Behavioral Economics Commons^™

Socioeconomic Effect On Crime In The Southwest United States Pre- And Post-Great Recession, Kristina Donathan, Jaewon Lim

Graduate Research Symposium (GCUA)

Facing the Great Recession, the Southwest megapolitan cluster in the United States including Las Vegas, Southern California and Sun Corridor in Arizona had a massive negative economic shock. Skyrocketing unemployment, massive foreclosures and other socioeconomic factors may negatively affect our safe environment with changing patterns in crime. This study aims to investigate the impacts of socioeconomic factors on different types of crimes committed in the megapolitan cluster of the Southwest United States. Using annual crime datasets, we look at the three years before the Great Recession and subsequent three years (2005-2010). The metropolitan areas, Los Angeles, CA, Las Vegas, NV ...

Incentives To Improve Economic Conditions: A Field Experiment In Medellin, Colombia, Lauren Skora

Master Theses

The motivation for this research is to replicate the Oakland based Family Independence Initiative (FII) and to test the components of this model. The FII program claims its success stems from a bottom-up approach structured around setting life-improving goals, mutual support groups, and small monetary incentives to achieve results. As the popularity of this program continues to gain momentum in the United States, we designed a field experiment to measure the impact of incentives on goal achievement and economic conditions as well as the overall impact of the FII model. We enrolled close to 200 small business owners in four ...

The Pigou-Dalton Principle And The Structure Of Distributive Justice, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

The Pigou-Dalton (PD) principle recommends a non-leaky, non-rank-switching transfer of goods from someone with more goods to someone with less. This Article defends the PD principle as an aspect of distributive justice --- enabling the comparison of two distributions, neither completely equal, as more or less just. It shows how the PD principle flows from a particular view, adumbrated by Thomas Nagel, about the grounding of distributive justice in individuals' "claims." And it criticizes two competing frameworks for thinking about justice that less clearly support the principle: the veil-of-ignorance framework, and Larry Temkin's proposal that fairer distributions are those concerning ...

Equity By The Numbers: Measuring Poverty, Inequality, And Injustice, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

Can we measure inequity? Can we arrive at a number or numbers capturing the extent to which a given society is equitable or inequitable? Sometimes such questions are answered with a “no”: equity is a qualitative, non-numerical consideration.

This Article offers a different perspective. The difficulty with equity measurement is not the impossibility of quantification, but the overabundance of possible metrics. There currently exist at least four families of equity-measurement frameworks, used by scholars and, to some extent, governments: inequality metrics (such as the Gini coefficient), poverty metrics, social-gradient metrics (such as the concentration index), and equity-regarding social welfare functions ...

Renewable Resource Extraction: Experimental Analysis Of Resource Management Policies Under Assumptions Of Resource Migration, Kevin Lugo '13

Student Publications

This paper presents research using a spatially explicit and dynamic common pool resource experiment to compare renewable resource extraction behavior between four treatments combining (1) open access and sole ownership institutions with (2) mobility and non-mobility of the renewable resource. The primary purpose of this research is to test the theory that introducing resource mobility into a sole ownership regime will remove the incentive for subjects to maximize the resource, instead causing them to revert to the myopic strategy predicted for the open access regime. I also test the hypothesis that open access firms are indifferent to resource dispersal. The ...

The Business Of Coupons-Do Coupons Lead To Repeat Purchases?, Margaret Peacher Ross

University of Tennessee Honors Thesis Projects

No abstract provided.

Essays In Macroeconomics Of Development, Douwere Eric Grekou

University of Western Ontario - Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis consists of three chapters on macroeconomics of development. The first chapter discusses the impact of educational corruption on economic development. Its main contribution lies in quantifying two channels of educational corruption: a direct channel, whereby incompetent workers affect production due to a misallocation of talent, and a dynamic indirect channel, which can be referred to as a teacher’s effect on the availability of competent agents for production. The results suggest that, for the countries with the highest levels of educational corruption, the losses in output per capita induced by the indirect channel are ten times as large ...

Choices In An Interdependent Economic Environment: Inequity Aversion And Bargaining Games, Andy Galbraith

Economics Theses

Experimental economics has revealed an underlying tension between preferences for fairness and the purely self-interested behavior assumed throughout economic theory. Though many models attempt to explain observed behavior that is inconsistent with theory, the motivations behind such deviations from theoretic equilibrium are still largely unknown.

This paper investigates preferences for fairness in a controlled laboratory setting using an ultimatum game variant. Payoffs to participants are altered over several treatments to examine if subjects exhibit behavior that is consistent with a preference model which incorporates envy and guilt into an individual’s utility function. The results indicate evidence of both guilt ...

The Business Of Coupons--Do Coupons Lead To Repeat Purchases?, Margaret Peacher Ross

EURēCA: Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement

Abstract:

In recent years, couponing has emerged as a pop-culture phenomenon. Businesses of all types are taking advantage of this resource by revamping their out-dated programs and turning them into something fresh to excite customers. However, many questions remain unanswered concerning the viability, profitability, and usefulness of coupons. This study is an analysis of the effectiveness of coupons in enticing return purchases in the soft-drink category. The dataset is comprised of household level grocery store transactions complied by dunnhumby for 2,500 households over a period of two years. An ordinary least squares regression technique is employed to analyze the ...

Does “Good” Corporate Governance Help In A Crisis? The Impact Of Country- And Firm-Level Governance Mechanisms In The European Financial Crisis, Marc Van Essen, Peter-Jan Engelen, Michael Carney

Marc van Essen

Hierarchical linear modeling shows that 25 percent of the heterogeneity in firm performance is among countries, indicating the importance of including country-level institutions in our analyses. In the context of the crisis we find that the general quality of the legal system and creditor rights protection are positively related to firm performance but protection for equity investors is not. Contrary to good governance prescriptions, we find that board characteristics associated with vigilant monitoring perform worse in a financial crisis. In a crisis, CEO duality is associated with better performance and the number of board subcommittees has a negative impact. Board ...

Does Child Sponsorship Have A Positive Impact On The Quality Of Life And Social Behavior Of Sponsored Children? Evidence From Indonesia, Mario Carrillo

Student Research & Creativity - Day of Celebration

Relaxing internal constraints of individuals at early stages of life is an approach that complements traditional policy interventions aimed to alleviate poverty. The Compassion International child sponsorship program focuses their work on the emotional, social, and spiritual development of sponsored children. This study uses age-eligibility as an instrument for sponsorship to investigate the impacts of child sponsorship on self-esteem, aspirational reference points, aspirational capital, reciprocity and patience. It also implements an innovative way of constructing summary indices using a method proposed by Anderson, M (2008). Results reveal child sponsorship does not have an effect on the sponsored children. In fact ...

Why Risk It? The Effect Of Risk And Time Preferences On Microfinance Loan Default, Nike Start

Student Research & Creativity - Day of Celebration

Microfinance is widely recognized as a powerful method for poverty alleviation. However, little is known about the characteristics of those who default on their loans. Understanding the behavior of borrowers is important to mitigate default for microfinance lenders. This study investigates whether non-delinquent and delinquent borrowers reveal any difference in their level of risk and time preference through an artefactual field experiment. The results reveal that non-delinquent borrowers are more likely to be risk-seeking individuals and are more impatient than delinquent borrowers, contradicting current literature on risk-aversion and time preference.

Incentives And Improved Economic Conditions: A Field Experiment In Medellin, Colombia, Lauren Skora

Student Research & Creativity - Day of Celebration

The motivation for this research is to replicate the Oakland based Family Independence Initiative (FII) and to test the components of this model. The FII program claims its success stems from a bottom-up approach structured around setting life improving goals, mutual support groups, and small monetary incentives for achieved results. We enrolled close to 200 small business owners in four experimental treatments (group, no-group, incentives, no-incentives) and a fifth external control group. The experimental data shows that incentives have the strongest overall impact in improving the likelihood of goal achievement and economic performance. Furthermore, the interaction of goal setting, groups ...

Towards Re-Thinking Ecology: Investigating The Influence Of Behavioral Economics On Ecological Thought, Ned Weidner

LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University

The current mainstream ecological discourse among environmental activists seems to be focused on changing the current paradigm of ecological thinking towards one focused primarily on sustainability through a deeper connection with the Earth. Often these activists argue this deeper connection with the Earth is best achieved through a paradigmatic change in thinking. It is the argument of this paper that those who champion a paradigmatic shift in thinking towards sustainability need to re-think their plan of action for creating a sustainable relationship with the Earth’s environment because changing society’s way of viewing ecological matters as a way to ...

Against Endowment Theory: Experimental Economics And Legal Scholarship, Gregory Klass, Kathryn Zeiler

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Endowment theory holds the mere ownership of a thing causes people to assign greater value to it than they otherwise would. The theory entered legal scholarship in the early 1990s and quickly eclipsed other accounts of how ownership affects valuation. Today, appeals to a generic “endowment effect” can be found throughout the legal literature. Recent experimental results, however, suggest that the empirical evidence for endowment theory is weak at best. Familiar early experiments, which used trades of mugs and candy bars or the sale or purchase of lottery tickets, employed procedures that did not rule out alternative explanations. By altering ...

Ethics And The Economist: What Climate Change Demands Of Us, Julie A. Nelson

Julie A. Nelson

Climate change is changing not only our physical world, but also our intellectual, social, and moral worlds. We are realizing that our situation is profoundly unsafe, interdependent, and uncertain. What, then, does climate change demand of economists, as human beings and as professionals? A discipline of economics based on Enlightenment notions of mechanism and disembodied rationality is not suited to present problems. This essay suggests three major requirements: first, that we take action; second, that we work together; and third, that we focus on avoiding the worst, rather than obtaining the optimal. The essay concludes with suggestions of specific steps ...

Distinguishing Probability Weighting From Risk Misperceptions In Field Data, Levon Barseghyan, Francesca Molinari, Ted O'Donoghue, Joshua C. Teitelbaum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The paper outlines a strategy for distinguishing rank-dependent probability weighting from systematic risk misperceptions in field data. Our strategy relies on singling out a field environment with two key properties: (i) the objects of choice are money lotteries with more than two outcomes and (ii) the ranking of outcomes differs across lotteries. We first present an abstract model of risky choice that elucidates the identification problem and our strategy. The model has numerous applications, including insurance choices and gambling. We then consider the application of insurance deductible choices and illustrate our strategy using simulated data.

Essays On Individual Choice And Behavior, Caleb A. Siladke

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three chapters that explore individual choice and behavior. Chapter 1 investigates the incentive properties of advisory referenda using a particular form of NEU theory which replaces the independence axiom assumed in EU theory with two less-restrictive assumptions: betweenness and fanning-out. Betweenness replaces the independence axiom and allows for context dependent risk attitudes. The fanning-out hypothesis then governs the precise way in which risk preferences change given the unique circumstances in which values are elicited. When the assumption of independence is relaxed, an individual's response to an advisory referendum depends on how consequential she believes her ...

Social Structure, Non-Market Valuation, And Bargaining, Bruno Moreira Wichmann

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three chapters that explore the effects of social utility on non-market values and bargaining.

Chapter 1 considers the role of social networks in the valuation of public goods. In the model individuals derive utility from both their own direct enjoyment of the public good as well as from the enjoyment of those in their social network. We find that the network increases an individual's valuation for the public good when members of her network have a higher weighted average valuation than she does. The network increases aggregate valuation when it assigns higher importance, that is ...

Gambling On Genes: Ambiguity Aversion Explains Investment In Sisters’ Children, Brishti Guha

Research Collection School of Economics (Open Access)

Many men invest in their sisters’ children instead of their wives’. Existing theories addressing such behavior depend on the level of paternity probability in such men’s societies being implausibly low. I link this anthropologically observed investment behavior with the experimentally observed phenomenon that some individuals are ambiguity averse. Arguing that men’s decisions are made under ambiguity, I show that an increase in ambiguity aversion results in investment in sisters’, rather than wives’, children. I show that this can happen even under risk neutrality. I also consider the special cases of a SEU maximizer and of extreme ambiguity aversion ...