University of Warwick
Cornell University
Iowa State University
SelectedWorks
Walden University
Western Michigan University
Buffalo State College
Bard College
University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
The Economics Of Babysitting A Robot,
2020
Chapman University
The Economics Of Babysitting A Robot, Aleksandr Alekseev
ESI Working Papers
I study the welfare effect of automation on workers in a setting where technology is complementary but imperfect. Using a modified task-based framework, I argue that imperfect complementary automation can impose non-pecuniary costs on workers via a behavioral channel. The theoretical model suggests that a critical factor determining the welfare effect of imperfect complementary automation is the automatability of the production process. I confirm the model's predictions in an experiment that elicits subjects' revealed preference for automation. Increasing automatability leads to a significant increase in the demand for automation. I explore additional drivers of the demand for automation using ...
Antitrust: What Counts As Consumer Welfare?,
2020
University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Antitrust: What Counts As Consumer Welfare?, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law
Antitrust’s consumer welfare principle is accepted in some form by the entire Supreme Court and the majority of other writers. However, it means different things to different people. For example, some members of the Supreme Court can simultaneously acknowledge the antitrust consumer welfare principle even as they approve practices that result in immediate, obvious, and substantial consumer harm. At the same time, however, a properly defined consumer welfare principle is essential if antitrust is to achieve its statutory purpose, which is to pursue practices that injure competition. The wish to make antitrust a more general social justice statute is ...
Notes On The Gridlab-D Household Equivalent Thermal Parameter Model,
2020
Iowa State University
Notes On The Gridlab-D Household Equivalent Thermal Parameter Model, Leigh Tesfatsion, Swathi Battula
Economics Working Papers
GridLAB-D (GLD) is an agent-based platform, developed by researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, that permits users to accurately simulate the state dynamics of power distribution systems at time scales ranging from sub-seconds to years. The purpose of this study is to present, in careful comprehensive form, a complete analytical state-space control representation for a version of the GLD Household Equivalent Thermal Parameter Model as support documentation for model users. This model is a physically-based implementation of a household with multiple price-responsive and conventional appliances whose thermal dynamics are determined over successive days by resident appliance usage and external weather ...
Analytical Scuc/Sced Optimization Formulation For Ames V5.0,
2020
Iowa State University
Analytical Scuc/Sced Optimization Formulation For Ames V5.0, Leigh Tesfatsion, Swathi Battula
Economics Working Papers
U.S. centrally-managed wholesale power markets currently rely on Security-Constrained Unit Commitment (SCUC) and Security Constrained Economic Dispatch (SCED) optimizations to determine unit commitments, reserve, and scheduled dispatch levels for generating units during future operating periods. AMES V5.0 is an open source Java/Python platform that implements a combined SCUC/SCED optimization capturing salient features of these actual market SCUC/SCED optimizations. This report provides extensive documentation for the analytical formulation of the AMES V5.0 SCUC/SCED optimization.
Forecasting Skills In Experimental Markets: Illusion Or Reality?,
2020
Chapman University
Forecasting Skills In Experimental Markets: Illusion Or Reality?, Brice Corgnet, Cary Deck, Mark Desantis, David Porter
ESI Working Papers
Using experimental asset markets, we study the situation of a financial analyst who is trying to infer the fundamental value of an asset by observing the market’s history. We find that such capacity requires both standard cognitive skills (IQ) as well as social and emotional skills. However, forecasters with high emotional skills tend to perform worse when market mispricing is high as they tend to give too much emphasis to the noisy signals from market data. By contrast, forecasters with high social skills perform especially well in markets with high levels of mispricing in which their skills could help ...
Public Leaderboard Feedback In Sampling Competition: An Experimental Investigation,
2020
Purdue University
Public Leaderboard Feedback In Sampling Competition: An Experimental Investigation, Stanton Hudja, Brian Roberson, Yaroslav Rosokha
ESI Working Papers
We investigate the role of performance feedback, in the form of a public leaderboard, in a sequential-sampling contest with costly observations. The player whose sequential random sample contains the observation with the highest value wins the contest and obtains a prize with a fixed value. We find that there exist parameter configurations such that in the subgame perfect equilibrium of contests with a fixed ending date (i.e., finite horizon), providing public performance feedback results in fewer expected observations and a lower expected value of the winning observation. We conduct a controlled laboratory experiment to test the theoretical predictions, and ...
Trust, Reciprocity, And Social History: New Pathways Of Learning When Max U (Own Reward) Fails Decisively,
2020
Chapman University
Trust, Reciprocity, And Social History: New Pathways Of Learning When Max U (Own Reward) Fails Decisively, Vernon L. Smith
ESI Working Papers
"This evaluation begins with the BDM protocol—itself a methodological contribution—and the experimental findings. The question of the replicability and robustness of these unexpected results is addressed next in a summary of two subsequent experimental papers. We follow with a discussion of two attempts to explain qua understand the BDM findings; both, however, have methological deficiencies—Reciprocity and Social Preference explanations. Finally, we offer a brief on Adam Smith’s (1759; 1853; hereafter in the text, Sentiments) model of human sociability, based on strictly self-interested actors, that culminates in propositions that (1) account for trust game choices, and (2 ...
What Do We Know About Health Insurance Choice?,
2020
University of Pennsylvania
What Do We Know About Health Insurance Choice?, Megan Mccarthy-Alfano
Issue Briefs
No abstract provided.
Rational Inattention And Timing Of Information Provision,
2020
Chapman University
Rational Inattention And Timing Of Information Provision, Diego Aycinena, Alexander Elbittar, Andrei Gomberg, Lucas Rentschler
ESI Working Papers
We consider the issue of how timing of provision of additional information affects information-acquisition incentives. In environments with costly attention, a sufficiently confident agent may choose to act based on the prior, without incurring those costs. However, a promise of additional information in the future may be used to encourage additional attentional effort. This may be viewed as a novel empirical implication of rational inattention. In a lab experiment designed to test this theoretical prediction, we show that promise of future “free” information induces subjects to acquire information which they would not be acquiring without such a promise.
Strategic Problems With Risky Prospects,
2020
Chapman University
Strategic Problems With Risky Prospects, Alessandro Sontuoso, Cristina Bicchieri, Alexander Funcke, Einav Hart
ESI Working Papers
We study “hypothetical reasoning” in games where the impact of risky prospects (chance moves with commonly-known conditional probabilities) is compounded by strategic uncertainty. We embed such games in an environment that permits us to verify if risk-taking behavior is affected by information that reduces the extent of strategic uncertainty. We then test some implications of expected utility theory, while making minimal assumptions about individuals’ (risk or ambiguity) attitudes. Results indicate an effect of the information on behavior: this effect is triggered in some cases by a belief-revision about others’ actions, and in other cases by a reversal in risk preferences.
Competition And Coming Clean,
2020
Chapman University
Competition And Coming Clean, Cary Deck, Dustin Tracy
ESI Working Papers
Conflicts of interest arise in many principal agent settings. Conventional wisdom suggests that the bias such incentives generate can be reduced with disclosure requirements, but at least some studies have found disclosure can exacerbate the level of bias. We consider an alternative force to reduce bias - market competition between agents and consider the effect of disclosure in the presence of market pressure. In each round of our experimental task, principals face a choice between two options and select among two agents from whom to seek advice. We test three treatments: one, in which the principals rate agents after receiving advice ...
An Experiment On The Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. Causes And Impact On Inequality,
2020
Universidad de Málaga
An Experiment On The Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. Causes And Impact On Inequality, Antonio J. Morales, Ismael Rodriguez-Lara
ESI Working Papers
Testing causal relationships expressed by mathematical models on facts about human behaviour across history is challenging. A prominent example is the Neolithic agricultural revolution [1]. Many theoretical models of the adoption of agriculture has been put forward [2] but none has been tested. The only exception is [3], that uses a computational approach with agent-based simulations of evolutionary games. Here, we propose two games that resemble the conditions of human societies before and after the agricultural revolution. The agricultural revolution is modelled as an exogenous shock in the lab (n=180, 60 independent groups), and the transition from foraging to ...
Trust And Trustworthiness After Negative Random Shocks,
2020
Chapman University
Trust And Trustworthiness After Negative Random Shocks, Hernán Bejerano, Joris Gillet, Ismael Rodriguez-Lara
ESI Working Papers
We investigate experimentally the effect of a negative endowment shock in a trust game to assess whether different causes of inequality have different effects on trust and trustworthiness. In our trust game there may be inequality in favor of the second mover and this may (or may not) be the result of a negative random shock (i.e., the outcome of a die roll) that decreases the endowment of the first-mover. Our findings suggest that inequality leads to differences in behavior. First-movers send more of their endowment and second-movers return more when there is inequality. However, we do not find ...
Religion In Economic History: A Survey,
2020
Monash University
Religion In Economic History: A Survey, Sascha O. Becker, Jared Rubin, Ludger Woessmann
ESI Working Papers
This chapter surveys the recent social science literature on religion in economic history, covering both socioeconomic causes and consequences of religion. Following the rapidly growing literature, it focuses on the three main monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and on the period up to WWII. Works on Judaism address Jewish occupational specialization, human capital, emancipation, and the causes and consequences of Jewish persecution. One set of papers on Christianity studies the role of the Catholic Church in European economic history since the medieval period. Taking advantage of newly digitized data and advanced econometric techniques, the voluminous literature on the Protestant Reformation ...
Trade Facilitation And Tariff Evasion,
2020
World Trade Organization
Trade Facilitation And Tariff Evasion, Cosimo Beverelli, Rohit Ticku
ESI Working Papers
This paper investigates the extent to which trade facilitation measures included in the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement affect tariff evasion. In a dataset covering 121 countries and the whole set of HS6 product categories in 2012, 2015, and 2017, the paper shows that trade facilitation measures that improve legal certainty for traders moderate tariff evasion. Holding tariff rate constant at its mean, one standard deviation improvement in trade facilitation measures related to legal certainty reduces tariff evasion, as measured by missing imports in trade statistics, by almost 12%. In a counterfactual with full trade liberalization, countries with higher scores on ...
Sanctuary Cities And Their Respective Effect On Crime Rates,
2020
Minnesota State University Moorhead
Sanctuary Cities And Their Respective Effect On Crime Rates, Adam R. Schutt
Undergraduate Economic Review
According to the U.S. Center for Immigration Studies (2017), cities or counties in twenty-four states declare themselves as a place of “sanctuary” for illegal immigrants. This study addresses the following question: Do sanctuary cities experience higher crime rates than those cities that are not? Using publicly available data, this regression analysis investigates the relationship between crime rates in selected cities and independent variables which the research literature or the media has linked to criminal activity. Results of this research reveal that sanctuary cities do not experience higher violent or property crime rates than those cities that are not sanctuary ...
The Flattening Of Japan’S Phillips Curve: An Unemployment Rate Analysis,
2020
Skidmore College
The Flattening Of Japan’S Phillips Curve: An Unemployment Rate Analysis, Hannah Kojima
Economics Student Theses and Capstone Projects
This paper examines the causes behind the flattening of the Japanese Phillips curve by analyzing the unemployment rate measure, and its role in the flattening of the curve. This paper will utilize the actual Japanese unemployment rates from 2002 through 2019, as well as estimate an alternative unemployment rates that takes into consideration discouraged workers. In my study, I recreate the Phillips curve using these two measures of unemployment, as well as implement a simple OLS regression to understand the slopes of each Phillips curves. I will also utilize the Weintraub equation in order to theorize factors that may be ...
Development Of A New Us Currency For The Post-Pandemic Remote Culture,
2020
University of Tennessee Health Science Center
Development Of A New Us Currency For The Post-Pandemic Remote Culture, F. Matthew Mihelic
Faculty Publications
The contemporary dollar currency was already under significant pressure prior to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the economic pressures resulting from the national and world “lockdown” have very significantly exacerbated the vulnerabilities of those Federal Reserve Notes. The ostensible nationalization of the Federal Reserve by the United States federal government in April 2020 is a harbinger of a need to restructure the US currency. Today’s developing remote culture necessitates a new form of electronic currency. Herein is a conceptual blueprint for the development of such a restructured US currency that would function in the post-pandemic remote culture.
Age Appropriate Wisdom? Ethnobiological Knowledge Ontogeny In Pastoralist Mexican Choyeros,
2020
Chapman University
Age Appropriate Wisdom? Ethnobiological Knowledge Ontogeny In Pastoralist Mexican Choyeros, Eric Schniter, Shane J. Macfarlan, Juan J. Garcia, Gorgonio Ruiz-Campos, Diego Guevara Beltran, Brenda B. Bowen, Jory C. Lerbak
ESI Working Papers
We investigate whether age profiles of ethnobiological knowledge development are consistent with predictions derived from life history theory about the timing of productivity and reproduction. Life history models predict complementary knowledge profiles developing across the lifespan for women and men as they experience changes in embodied capital and the needs of dependent offspring. We evaluate these predictions using an ethnobiological knowledge assessment tool developed for an off-grid pastoralist population, known as Choyeros, from Baja California Sur, Mexico. Our results indicate that while individuals acquire knowledge of most dangerous items and edible resources by early adulthood, knowledge of plants and animals ...
Interest Rate Setting Behavior In The Philippines,
2020
Skidmore College
Interest Rate Setting Behavior In The Philippines, Inigo Ugarte
Economics Student Theses and Capstone Projects
This paper examines the recent conduct of monetary policy in the Philippines and the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’ (BSP) interest rate setting behavior. In this paper, I use a standard open economy reaction function to see whether the BSP reacts more to changes in the inflation rate, exchange rate, and or the output gap. I find that in the Philippines, the interest rate responds strongly to exchange rates. Furthermore, interest rates are less consistently explained by inflation and more accurately explained by exchange rates. This tends to suggest that the BSP goes against its inflation targeting strategy and supports a ...
