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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Lottery Rather Than Waiting-Line Auction, Winston T. H. Koh, Zhenlin Yang, Lijing Zhu Oct 2006

Lottery Rather Than Waiting-Line Auction, Winston T. H. Koh, Zhenlin Yang, Lijing Zhu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper investigates the allocative efficiency of two non-price allocation mechanisms – the lottery (random allocation) and the waiting-line auction (queue system) – for the cases where consumers possess identical time costs (the homogeneous case), and where time costs are correlated with time valuations (the heterogeneous case). We show that the relative efficiency of the two mechanisms depends critically on a scarcity factor (measured by the ratio of the number of objects available for allocation over the number of participants) and on the shape of the distribution of valuations. We show that the lottery dominates the waiting-line auction for a …


What Matter For Child Development?, Fali Huang Oct 2006

What Matter For Child Development?, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper estimates production functions of child cognitive and social development using a panel data of nine-year old children each with over two hundred home and school inputs as well as family background variables. A tree regression method is used to conduct estimation under various speci…cations. A small subset of inputs is found consistently important in explaining variances of child development results, including the number of books a child has at various ages and how often a mother reads to child by age …ve, while the e¤ects of race and maternal employment are negligible when detailed inputs are controlled.


Expectations, Animal Spirits, And Evolutionary Dynamics, Angelo Antoci, Massimiliano Landi, Pier Luigi Sacco Mar 2006

Expectations, Animal Spirits, And Evolutionary Dynamics, Angelo Antoci, Massimiliano Landi, Pier Luigi Sacco

Research Collection School Of Economics

We consider a (deterministic) evolutionary model where players have dynamic expectations about the strategy distribution. We provide a global analysis of the co-evolution of play and expectations for a generic two-by-two game. Besides the the typical indeterminacy of the evolutionary dynamics, we find some other ones: for any initial strategy configuration the dynamics can converge to any asymptotically stable fixed point, for different initial values of the expectations. Moreover, starting from the same initial pair of strategy configuration and values of expectations, the dynamics may lead to different asymptotically stable fixed points for different parameters of the expectations.


Strategy Meets Evolution: Games Suppliers And Producers Play, Brishti Guha Feb 2006

Strategy Meets Evolution: Games Suppliers And Producers Play, Brishti Guha

Research Collection School Of Economics

Final goods producers, who may be intrinsically honest (a behavioral type) or opportunistic (strategic), play a repeated game of imperfect information with suppliers of an input of variable (and non-verifiable) quality. Returns to cheating are increasing in the proportion of intrinsically honest producers. If producers compete for another scarce input, adverse selection reduces this proportion enough to enforce universal honesty, whether at a high or a low quality equilibrium. This mechanism limits the proportion of behavioral types in the population of producers over a wide range of parameters: despite their inability to compete with opportunists, they are not wholly wiped …


Homeostasis And Well Being, Malcolm Dowling, Chin Fang Yap Feb 2006

Homeostasis And Well Being, Malcolm Dowling, Chin Fang Yap

Research Collection School Of Economics

The paper suggests that maintenance of a homeostatic equilibrium provides a rationale for many actions of economic agents. Homeostatic equilibrium has physical, economic, emotional, psychological and environmental dimensions. The characteristics of this equilibrium include feelings of safety, trust, connectedness with friends, family and community, and a predictable and welcoming social and work environment. Individuals generally make decisions that help them move toward and achieve this state of equilibrium. Departure from homeostasis reduces well being and stimulates agents to take actions that will return them to a state of homeostasis. This hypothesis is tested with probit analysis using sample responses from …