Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Local Competition, Multimarket Contact, And Product Quality: Evidence From Internet Service Provision, Kyle Wilson

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

I investigate the effect of competition on quality in the internet service provision industry: I examine both local competition within markets and multimarket contact among firms across markets. This industry offers an ideal setting, as quality is both objective and measurable. I use data from speedtest.net from 2008 to 2014 to estimate a reduced-form model of the effects of local competition and multimarket contact on realized consumer download speeds. I find that increased multimarket contact leads to decreased download speeds, which is consistent with the mutual forbearance hypothesis. I also find that duopolies lead to faster download speeds than do …

Endogenous Preferences: A Challenge To Constitutional Political Economy's Normative Foundation?, Malte Dold

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

This paper starts with the observation from behavioral economics that preferences are endogenous, i.e., they are unstable, context-dependent, and open to processes of adaptation. It then asks whether welfare analysis and normative economics are still possible in a world populated by people with endogenous preferences. In particular, it looks at recent proposals by Viktor Vanberg and Carl Christian von Weizsacker. In highlighting an institutional perspective, both can be seen as proponents of modern ordoliberalism and both claim that their approaches can deal with the issue of endogenous preferences in a more coherent way than approaches that remain within the mind …

Behavioural Normative Economics: Foundations, Approaches And Trends, Malte Dold

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

This article summarises the theoretical foundations, main approaches and current trends in the field of behavioural normative economics. It identifies bounded rationality and bounded willpower as the two core concepts that have motivated the field. Since the concepts allow for individual preferences to be context-dependent and time-inconsistent, they pose an intricate problem for standard welfare analysis. The article discusses the ways in which two prominent approaches - the preference purification approach and the opportunity approach - have tackled the problem. It argues that shortcomings in each of these approaches motivate an agency-centric perspective. The article presents two concrete policy proposals …

The Principal Problem With Principal Components Regression, Heidi Margaret Artigue, Heidi Margaret Artigue

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

Principal components regression (PCR) reduces a large number of explanatory variables down to a small number of principal components. PCR is thought to be more useful, the more numerous the potential explanatory variables. The reality is that a large number of candidate explanatory variables does not make PCR more valuable; instead, it magnifies the failings of PCR.

The Maine Chance: Private-Public Partnership And The Katahdin Woods And Waters National Monument, Char Miller

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

The claim of a federal “land grab” in response to the creation of Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in Maine revealed a lack of historical awareness by critics of how two other cherished parks were established there: through private-public partnerships and the donation of land by private citizens.

Danger Below: Socal’S Dams Face Same Risks As Oroville, Char Miller, Frank Connor Lyles '17

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Riding The Wave: Open Access, Digital Publishing, And The Undergraduate Thesis, Char Miller

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

Char Miller, W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis at Pomona College, Claremont, CA., gave the Opening Keynote for the USETDA 2013 Conference, July 24-26, held on the Claremont McKenna College and Scripps College campuses.

In this keynote address, Dr. Miller discusses the importance of building the educational foundation to support students and then incorporate opportunities for undergraduates to share their research.

Dr. Miller draws from his experience collaborating with librarians to integrate information literacy into the curriculum and requiring that all senior theses in the program be posted on the Claremont Colleges' Open Access institutional repository, Scholarship@Claremont.

The Brave New World Of Open Access & Creative Commons: A Humanistic Experiment In Mathematical Publishing, Gizem Karaali

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

In January 2011 the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (JHM) published its first issue. JHM (http://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm) is an online-only, peer-reviewed, open-access journal which has passed the all important ten-thousand-download barrier in its first anniversary. In order to remain faithful to the fundamental principles of open access, JHM uses Creative Commons licensing, where authors retain copyright of their work, but others are free to reuse them (with proper attribution). In this note I share and reflect upon our experience with open access and Creative Commons.

Coalitions And Cliques In The School Choice Problem, Sinan Aksoy, Alexander Adam Azzam, Chaya Coppersmith, Julie Glass, Gizem Karaali, Xueying Zhao, Xinjing Zhu

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

The school choice mechanism design problem focuses on assignment mechanisms matching students to public schools in a given school district. The well-known Gale Shapley Student Optimal Stable Matching Mechanism (SOSM) is the most efficient stable mechanism proposed so far as a solution to this problem. However its inefficiency is well-documented, and recently the Efficiency Adjusted Deferred Acceptance Mechanism (EADAM) was proposed as a remedy for this weakness. In this note we describe two related adjustments to SOSM with the intention to address the same inefficiency issue. In one we create possibly artificial coalitions among students where some students modify their …

San Antonio, Texas: 1989-2011, Char Miller

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

What I Learned At The Maa Digital Library Workshop, Gizem Karaali

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

Toward the end of July 2006, an item appeared briefly on the MAA website. This was the call for participants for the MAA Digital Library Workshop. Curious surfers like me clicked on it to find the description of this workshop, which was to be held over the course of a weekend in October 2006 in Washington, DC. The announcement included a cryptic sentence of the form “The primary aims of the workshop are to provide an overview of the two MAA digital libraries and of the National Science Digital Library, and to prepare participants to offer a short workshop on …

Olmos Park And The Creation Of A Suburban Bastion, Char Miller, Heywood T. Sanders

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

An examination of this small Texas community will also cast light on the larger world of which it was a part. The development of Olmos Park, then, was inextricably bound up with and reflective of the political machinations and social problems that dominated San Antonio in the first decades of this century. As Mauerman understood, the suburb was a fragment of the urban whole, an observation that needs to be pushed one step farther. The forces that shaped Olmos Park and determined its relations with San Antonio were also part of a national pattern, of tensions generated by the explosive …

The Rise Of Urban Texas, Char Miller, David R. Johnson

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

Texas contains three of the nation's ten largest cities, but their existence has not yet affected the hold that the state's rural heritage has on Texas' imagination--or so Texans' attachment to two nineteenth-century cultural landmarks, the Alamo and the Chisholm Trail, would suggest. As the shrine of Texas liberty, the Alamo continually generates elegies to the manly courage and bravery of the fallen heroes of 1836.