Economics Commons^™

Stochastic Modeling Of Decarbonizing Strategy, Policy, And Market-Induced Incentives For The Us Electricity Sector, Jessica W.A. Azure, Samuel Frimpong, Mahelet G. Fikru

Mining Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In line with the global pursuit of achieving net-zero carbon emissions, integrating carbon capture and storage (CCS) and renewable energy (RE) technologies is important in power production. This study evaluates the profitability of CCS and RE technologies as alternative ways of achieving climate change goals. While past research focused on costs, technological advancements, and capture methods, there is a need for more studies on assessing the financial feasibility of these climate change solutions under uncertain conditions, alongside specific performance goals and strategies to entice power producers. Using a comprehensive framework featuring deterministic and stochastic modeling approaches, this research explores the …

Creating Law And Order: A Content-Centered Manifest Destiny Activity, Presley Shilling, Jeffrey Byford, Alisha Milam

The Councilor: A National Journal of the Social Studies

This content activity shows how Robert Stahl’s negotiation activity approach can promote decision-making in the social studies classroom. The effects of the activity on students’ ability to replicate the actions of settlers taking the journey to the western territories in search of gold. Incorporating Robert Stahl’s four decision-making phases, students negotiate social, political, and economic issues associated with the mining town of Bodie, California. In doing so, students must, individually or in small groups, decide and prioritize a series of proposals to better the living conditions, economic struggles, and social problems that have plagued Bodie for some time.

Unbounding Rationality: Observing And Mitigating K-12 Public Education Administrators’ Cognitive Bias, Julie K. Mesaros

West Chester University Doctoral Projects

Humans tend to simplify complex decisions by employing cognitive bias(es). Cognitively biased decision-making by public administrators can be adversely consequential for public organizations, public employees, and the public interest. Given the historical scope of experimental research on cognitive bias in the social and physical sciences, public administration scholars should continue to advance such research across various public sectors. This dissertation study responded to the long-ago call of Herbert Simon for empirical research situated in specific public or political contexts. This qual-QUAN mixed-method study had two main aims: (1) explore decisions that K-12 public education administrators make in personnel management and …

Impact Of Fear On Interpersonal And Economic Decision-Making, John Wilson

Economics Undergraduate Honors Theses

Fear is one of the most basic, intrinsic, and powerful emotions an individual may experience when faced with known or unknown threats, imminent pressures, or expectations of approaching doom. Fear may allow an individual to act quickly in a fight-or-flight response. Fear can alter both physiological and psychological frameworks to avoid certain calamity. Fear provides motivation to protect oneself or to effectuate altruistic behavior towards others for the greater good. One lesser explored area of research pertaining to fear and its implications is the influence of fear on interpersonal and economic decision-making. Economic volatility can produce both immediate consequences as …

Decision Making In International Supply Chain Investment, Noah Quint Curtin

Undergraduate Theses, Capstones, and Recitals

In this paper, supply chain decision-makers where and how to internationally invest into supply chains. I focus on outside institutional factors, and intra-firm behavioral factors that affect where and how they invest. I first review the literature on international investment at large. Later for my part of the research, I conduct a series of semi-structured interviews with international supply chain decision-maker primarily in Denver to better understand their processes. I find that they value business models higher than “hunches”, but also that tacit knowledge and relationships play an important role in their processes.

Hot Boy Summer? Analyzing Managerial Reactions To Season-Long Fluctuating Player Performance In Major League Baseball, John Rodgers Hood

Honors Projects

This paper suggests numerical weights that a Major League Baseball (MLB) manager may use when comparing player performance across multiple past performance periods to predict future performance. By the end of the MLB regular season, current season performance becomes more predictive than prior season performance for pitchers but not hitters. After estimating weights for different past time periods of performance, this paper compares the weights with how managers value performance in high-stakes situations across these same time periods. I find that MLB managers overreact to recent performance by both hitters and pitchers in postseason settings.

The Effect Of Magnitude And Probability On Plea Bargain Decision-Making, Megan L. Small

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Decision-making is studied in various aspects of life and can be especially vital in the context of the criminal justice system, such as plea bargains. Previous research in this area used a less commonly used task (fill-in-the-blank) in addition to a student sample (Falligant & Pence, 2019). The current study uses probability discounting to study the choice between accepting a plea bargain for a shorter incarceration sentence or risking a trial with a longer sentence on a sample of adults with experience in the criminal justice system. Three sentence durations, or magnitudes, were used (1 year, 5 years, and 25 …

Effects Of The Covid-19 Pandemic On Gambling Behavior And Revenues: A Multi-State Analysis, Xiaoling W. Sundberg

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on individual gambling behavior by testing whether ticket sales and revenues in the multi-state parimutuel PowerBall and MegaMillions lotteries decreased or increased between the pre-COVID and COVID periods in Florida, Texas, and Colorado. Two competing hypotheses are investigated. First, gambling activity may have decreased during COVID either due to increased risk-aversion induced by the pandemic, negative changes in household income from the loss of employment, or a combination of the two. Second, gambling activity may have increased during COVID either due to increased willingness to take risks, substitution of income previously …

The Effects Of Religiosity On Gender-Differentiated Household Decision-Making In Indonesia, Juliann Phillips

Economics Undergraduate Honors Theses

Religion is a dominant influence in household decision-making and is an important factor in understanding intra-household bargaining power, especially within developing countries. It is important to understand the extent to which religious beliefs affect decisions made within the household when designing interventions to improve women’s agency. This paper examines the fourth wave of the Indonesia Family Life Survey using the difference-in-differences method to analyze the impact of Islamic religiosity on the likelihood of allowing women within the household to make certain decisions in eight critical categories. While stereotypical beliefs may negatively correlate women’s bargaining power and high levels of religiosity …

Behavioral Economic Modeling Of The Effects Of Symptom, Severity, And Cost On Seeking Medical Care, Mark J. Rzeszutek

Dissertations

While the United States has some of the highest healthcare spending in the world, it has some of the worst health outcomes. For example, maternal mortality in the United States is almost five times as high as in other similarly wealthy countries. It also has the highest rates of avoidable deaths. One of the reasons for this may be the cost of accessing healthcare due to privatized insurance. For example, Americans may avoid important preventive medical visits and other health screeners due to cost. While lack of health insurance has been correlated with decreased health utilization, a precise understanding of …

Bias And Productivity In Humans And Machines, Bo Cowgill

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Where should better learning technology (such as machine learning or AI) improve decisions? I develop a model of decision-making in which better learning technology is complementary with experimentation. Noisy, inconsistent decision-making introduces quasi-experimental variation into training datasets, which complements learning. The model makes heterogeneous predictions about when machine learning algorithms can improve human biases. These algorithms can remove human biases exhibited in historical training data, but only if the human training decisions are sufficiently noisy; otherwise, the algorithms will codify or exacerbate existing biases. Algorithms need only a small amount of noise to correct biases that cause large productivity distortions. …

Choice Architecture For Healthier Insurance Choices: Ordering And Partitioning Can Improve Decisions, Benedict G.C. Dellaert, Eric J. Johnson, Tom Baker

All Faculty Scholarship

Health insurance decisions are a challenge for many consumers and influence welfare, health outcomes, and longevity. Two choice architecture tools are examined that can improve these decisions: informed ordering of options (from best to worst) and choice set partitioning. It is hypothesized that these tools can improve choices by changing: (1) decision focus: the options in a set on which consumers focus their attention, and (2) decision strategy: how consumers integrate the different attributes that make up the options. The first experiment focuses on the mediating role of the hypothesized decision processes on consumer decision outcomes. The outcome results are …

Individual Differences In Discounting Delayed Gains, Delayed Losses, And Probabilistic Losses, Yu-Hua Yeh

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many decisions in one’s daily life involve the discounting of delayed or probabilistic losses: Should we pay off our credit-card balance in full or incur interest; should we buy more collision and liability insurance or risk having to pay more in case of an accident? Despite its importance, however, discounting of losses is understudied, and few studies have focused on individual differences. The current study recruited 407 on-line participants through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk who completed three discounting questionnaires: delayed losses, probabilistic losses, and delayed gains. Magnitude effects were observed with delayed gains (i.e., larger delayed gains were discounted less steeply …

Screening Stocks Based On The Rational Approach To Decision-Making, Demetri Kantarelis

Economics, Finance and International Business Department Faculty Works

I propose a rational approach (RA) to decision-making process which, I believe, can be adapted as an alternative methodology for screening stocks. Subject to various constraints (e.g., budget, time horizon, market scope, etc.), the proposed methodology requires the consideration of several alternatives and criteria, assignment of weights of importance, and grading. Undoubtedly, decisions based on the RA ought to be characterized as rationally subjective. Naturally, the degree of rationality ought to be dependent on the capability of the decision maker to legally collect information based on the asset’s history, present performance of the issuing firm, and future forecasts; of course, …

Emotions, Intuitions And Risk Perception In Critical Care, Oleksandr Dubov

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The theory of decision-making as it applies to bioethics and healthcare assumes a rational decision maker: someone who knows all his alternatives, has clear preferences, can rank and weigh risks and benefits of an intervention, and always acts in his own best interests. However, the growing body of research from the field of decision science shows that, in reality, such a purely rational decision maker does not exist. Instead, patients are rational within personal or environmental constraints such as uncertainty or ambiguity in which non-rational approaches such as emotion and intuition are instrumental. This issue is particularly important in critical …

Equilibrium With Consumer Adjustment To Choice, Matthew G. Nagler

Economics Working Papers

I present a spatial model of differentiated product markets in which consumers with heterogeneous tastes rationally improve their attitude towards the product they choose. Adjustment raises prices if adjustment facility is greater for consumers who initially prefer a product more (e.g., preferences and corresponding adjustments exhibit the halo effect). It lowers prices if instead easier adjustment for consumers with weaker initial preferences causes attitudinal regression to the mean. The theory explains higher prices in markets to the poor and less educated and so motivates re-examination of previously proposed solutions to the poor performance of those markets.

The Effects Of Alcohol Use On Economic Decision Making, Klajdi Bregu, Cary Deck, Lindsay Ham, Salar Jahedi

ESI Working Papers

It is notoriously hard to study the effect of alcohol on decision making, given the selection that takes place in who drinks alcohol and when they choose to do so. In a controlled laboratory experiment, we study the causal effect of alcohol on economic decision making. We examine the impact of alcohol on the following types of tasks: math and logic, uncertainty, overconfidence, strategic games, food choices, anchoring, and altruism. Our results indicate that alcohol consumption, as measured by the blood alcohol concentration (BAC), increases cooperation in strategic settings and altruism in Dictator games. We do not find any effects …

Indicators Of Gendered Control Over Agricultural Resources: A Guide For Agricultural Policy And Research, Smriti Rao

Economics and Global Studies Department Faculty Works

Although the importance of women’s contribution to the agricultural sector in developing countries is now widely acknowledged, there is little systematic evidence on how gender gaps in control over resources have changed over time in response to agricultural policy and technological interventions. In particular, few large-scale, national-level studies examine these effects for developing countries. This is surprising in light of the pervasive impact of agricultural technology and policy innovation on gender differences in control over productive resources for agriculture. Women are farmers and agricultural laborers in every part of the world. They are often responsible for the storage and processing …

Trends In The Effect Of Economic Insecurity On The Allocation Of Household Expenditures In The U.S., 1980-2005, Kirsten Bartlett Lauber

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The transition to late-capitalism in the U.S. has generated extensive societal change. This paper examines the intersection of three of these changes: the transition to a consumer-oriented economic and societal model, the increase of economic insecurity experienced by individuals and households and the heightened emphasis on a short-term orientation in individual decision-making. A review of literature from the fields of Sociology, Economics and Psychology describes differing understandings of how individuals react to the heightened economic insecurity that households experience under late-capitalism. Within mainstream Economics', theoretical and empirical work suggests that individuals respond to insecurity by reducing spending and maximizing long-term …

Comparative Approaches To Studying Strategy: Towards An Evolutionary Account Of Primate Decision Making, Sarah F. Brosnan, Michael J. Beran, Audrey E. Parrish, Sara A. Price, Bart J. Wilson

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

How do primates, humans included, deal with novel problems that arise in interactions with other group members? Despite much research regarding how animals and humans solve social problems, few studies have utilized comparable procedures, outcomes, or measures across different species. Thus, it is difficult to piece together the evolution of decision making, including the roots from which human economic decision making emerged. Recently, a comparative body of decision making research has emerged, relying largely on the methodology of experimental economics in order to address these questions in a cross-species fashion. Experimental economics is an ideal method of inquiry for this …

State Institutionalization, Governance And Decision Making In Sudan, Professor Issam A.W. Mohamed

Professor Issam A.W. Mohamed

The study here presented reviews the institutional structure of the Sudanese government. Truly, though it is stigmatized as totalitarian, the structure is phenotypically perfect. Ministry of Ministries council is supposed to cater for analyzing data concerning ministries performance, drawing strategic planning, executing them through ministries and conduct the follow-ups. Department of decision-making was created and packages for data collection and analyses were improvised. However, all these structures seem skeletal as the final decisions structurally seem to be lost between the Presidency Institution and the executive institutions. An introduced flowing chart indicates that the cycle of all decisions end up at …

Voodoo Multipliers Revisited: Public Policy For Recessions And Boomtimes, Philip E. Graves

PHILIP E GRAVES

There is no abstract for this brief column.

Optimal Public Goods Provision: Implications Of Endogenizing The Labor/Leisure Choice, Nicholas E. Flores, Philip E. Graves

PHILIP E GRAVES

Conventional analysis of public goods provision aggregates individual willingness to pay while treating income as exogenous, ignoring the fact that we generate income to allow us to purchase utility-generating goods. We explore the implications of endogenizing the lahor-leisure decision by explicitly considering leisure demand in a model of public goods provision. We consider benefit analysis of public goods provision and find that increments of the public good will generally be under-valued using conventional analysis while decrements to the public good (rare in public good settings) will be overvalued (JELC91,D61,Q5I)

The Impact Of Education Decentralization On Education Output: A Cross-Country Study, Eunice Heredia-Ortiz

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation examines, both theoretically and empirically, the impact of expenditure decentralization and decision-making in education on education output measured through net enrollment rates, repetition rates, dropout rates, completion rates, and test scores in science at the primary school level. We develop a theoretical model based on a behavioral production function model that investigates the potential direct effects of education decentralization on output, and indirect effects of education decentralization through its impact on family, school and teacher inputs. We develop an unbalanced panel data model of education decentralization by using various econometric estimators on a dataset of fifty-nine countries, developed …

It’S Not About The Money: The Role Of Preferences, Cognitive Biases And Heuristics Among Professional Athletes, Michael Mccann

Law Faculty Scholarship

Professional athletes are often regarded as selfish, greedy, and out-of-touch with regular people. They hire agents who are vilified for negotiating employment contracts that occasionally yield compensation in excess of national gross domestic products. Professional athletes are thus commonly assumed to most value economic remuneration, rather than the love of the game or some other intangible, romanticized inclination.

Lending credibility to this intuition is the rational actor model, a law and economic precept which presupposes that when individuals are presented with a set of choices, they rationally weigh costs and benefits, and select the course of action that maximizes their …

Reconsidering Gender And Investment In The Intrahousehold Decision-Making Process, Lin Johnson Iii

University Avenue Undergraduate Journal of Economics

In the very recent past, the economics of the household and the economics of development appear to be edging toward a new convergence of concern around the nature and use of assets. However, these two literatures of economics continue to exist in separate spheres. I draw from both bodies of literature in order to examine gender differences in asset portfolios. I find systematic differences in the way that certain assets held by husbands versus wives influence household decision outcomes. A clear understanding of the nature and functions of various types of assets in hands of husbands and wives is necessary …

Housing Preferences Of Spanish-Speaking Migrants, Pueo Keffer

University Avenue Undergraduate Journal of Economics

In this research I attempt to model and investigate the housing decisions of Spanish-speaking migrants. I use methods developed by Bajari and Kahn (2002) to obtain willingness to pay measurements for the migrant groups in samples drawn from three major California cities. I then apply these results to several hypotheses that attempt to describe current migration patterns of Hispanics into increasingly segregated communities characterized by high levels of crowding, low educational attainment, and high levels of Spanish speakers. This research finds that spoken language plays a significant role in a migrant’s decision process. Spanish-speaking migrants demonstrate a significant preference for …

Health Transfers: An Application Of Health-Health Analysis To Assess Food Safety Regulations, Fred Kuchler, Jackqueline L. Teague, Richard A. Williams, Don W. Anderson

RISK: Health, Safety & Environment (1990-2002)

The authors apply a Health-Health Analysis to risks associated with harvesting Gulf oysters to evaluate that approach to managing health and safety risks.

Agenda: Natural Resource Development In Indian Country, University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center

Natural Resource Development in Indian Country (Summer Conference, June 8-10)

Conference organizers and/or faculty included University of Colorado School of Law professors David H. Getches, Charles F. Wilkinson, Lawrence J. MacDonnell and Richard B. Collins.

Indian reservations constitute about 2.5% of all land in the country and 5% of all land in the American West. During the last two decades, Indian natural resources issues have moved to the forefront as tribal governments have dramatically expanded their regulatory programs, judicial systems. and resource development activities. This major symposium will address current developments and assess likely future directions in the areas of tribal, federal, and state regulation; tribal-state intergovernmental agreements; financing; mineral …