Economic Theory Commons^™

Does Bitcoin Use Affect Crime Rates?, Kevin Keane

The Corinthian

Bitcoin is the most widely used cryptocurrency in the world because of its decentralized network that completes user-to-user transactions, eliminating the need for intermediaries. During 2017, the volume of Bitcoin transactions totaled $94.3 trillion. Bitcoin transactions are recorded in a public database called the blockchain. Although the blockchain can keep track of how many transactions there are, it can’t identify the people involved in transactions. The lack of identity increases the anonymity of Bitcoin transactions, making it less detectable when used for crime. Using the Uniform Crime Reporting’s state-level crime rate data and blockchain’s Bitcoin transaction ...

Keeping A Clean Reputation: More Evidence On The Perverse Effects Of Disclosure, Cary Deck, J. Dustin Tracy

ESI Working Papers

When a principal relies on the advice of an agent, a conflict of interest can encourage the agent to provide advice that is biased in a self-serving manner. Conventional wisdom suggests that such behavior can be minimized with disclosure requirements. However, disclosure has been shown to exacerbate self-serving bias and actually lead to greater harm for the principal in one-shot interactions. In many naturally occurring market settings, agents form reputations, a mechanism that diminishes the incentive to provide biased advice. In this paper, we test for bias in the advice agents provide when faced with reputation concerns and examine the ...

Speed Traps: Algorithmic Trader Performance Under Alternative Market Structures, Yan Peng, Jason Shachat, Lijia Wei, S. Sarah Zhang

ESI Working Papers

Using laboratory experiments, we illustrate that trading algorithms that prioritize low latency pose certain pitfalls in a variety of market structures and configurations. In hybrid double auctions markets with human traders and trading agents, we find superior performance of trading agents to human traders in balanced markets with the same number of human and Zero Intelligence Plus (ZIP) buyers and sellers only, thus providing a partial replication of Das et al. (2001). However, in unbalanced markets and extreme market structures, such as monopolies and duopolies, fast ZIP agents fall into a speed trap and both human participants and slow ZIP ...

A Theory Of Cultural Revivals, Murat Iyigun, Jared Rubin, Avner Seror

ESI Working Papers

Why do some societies have political institutions that sustain and support productively inefficient outcomes? And why do social groups vested in these outcomes often reemerge and reestablish their influence over time even when they are incapable of blocking changes that are detrimental to their interests? We propose an explanation centered on the interplay between institutions and culture. We build a model in which cultural values are transmitted inter-generationally. The cultural composition of society, in turn, determines public goods provision as well as the future political power of the different cultural groups. We characterize the Subgame Perfect Equilibria of the model ...

Correlation-Robust Auction Design, Wei He, Jiangtao Li

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study the design of auctions when the auctioneer has limited statistical information about the joint distribution of the bidders’ valuations. More specifically, we consider an auctioneer who has an estimate of the marginal distribution of a generic bidder’s valuation but does not have reliable information about the correlation structure. We analyze the performance of mechanisms in terms of revenue guarantee, that is, the greatest lower bound of revenue across all joint distributions that are consistent with the marginals. A simple auction format, the second-price auction with no reserve price, is shown to be asymptotically optimal. Furthermore, for any ...

Data For "An Experimental Investigation Of Health Insurance Policy And Behavior", Josef Dustin Tracy, Hillard Kaplan, Kevin James, Stephen Rassenti

Economic Science Institute Data Sets

We introduce a new experimental approach to measuring the effects of health insurance policy alternatives on behavior and health outcomes over the life course. Cash-motivated subjects are placed in a virtual environment where they earn income and allocate it across multi-period lives. We compare behavior across age, income and insurance plans---one priced according to an individual's expected cost and the other uniformly priced through employer-implemented cost sharing. We find that 1) subjects in the employer-implemented plan purchased insurance at higher rates; 2) the employer-based plan reduced differences due to income and age; 3) subjects in the actuarial plan engaged ...

The Effect Of Sleep On Public Good Contributions And Punishment: Experimental Evidence, Jeremy Clark, David L. Dickinson

ESI Publications

We investigate the effect of a full week of sleep restriction (SR) vs. well-restedness (WR) on contributions in a common public good experiment, the voluntary contributions mechanism (VCM). We examine the effect of sleep manipulation on decisions regarding both contributions and punishment of non-contributors. Actigraphy devices are used to confirm that our random assignment to sleep condition generates significant differences in objective nightly sleep duration and sleepiness. We find that when punishment is unavailable public good contributions do not differ by SR/WR assignment. When punishment is available, we find evidence that SR subjects contribute more than WR subjects, respond ...

Rapidly Declining Body Temperature In A Tropical Human Population, Michael Gurven, Thomas Kraft, Sarah Alami, Juan Copajira Adrian, Edhitt Cortez Linares, Daniel Cummings, Daniel Eid Rodriguez, Paul L. Hooper, Adrian Jaeggi, Raul Quispe Gutierrez, Ivan Maldonado Suarez, Edmond Seabright, Hillard Kaplan, Jonathan Stieglitz, Benjamin C. Trumble

ESI Publications

Normal human body temperature (BT) has long been considered to be 37.0°C. Yet, BTs have declined over the past two centuries in the United States, coinciding with reductions in infection and increasing life expectancy. The generality of and reasons behind this phenomenon have not yet been well studied. Here, we show that Bolivian forager-farmers (n = 17,958 observations of 5481 adults age 15+ years) inhabiting a pathogen-rich environment exhibited higher BT when first examined in the early 21st century (~37.0°C). BT subsequently declined by ~0.05°C/year over 16 years of socioeconomic and epidemiological change ...

Competitive Harm From Vertical Mergers, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

The antitrust enforcement Agencies' 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines introduce a nontechnical application of bargaining theory into the assessment of competitive effects from vertical acquisitions. The economics of such bargaining is complex and can produce skepticism among judges, who might regard its mathematics as overly technical, its game theory as excessively theoretical or speculative, or its assumptions as unrealistic.

However, we have been there before. The introduction of concentration indexes, particularly the HHI, in the Merger Guidelines was initially met with skepticism but gradually they were accepted as judges became more comfortable with them. The same thing very largely happened again ...

Nonparametric Bounds On Treatment Effects With Imperfect Instruments, Kyunghoon Ban, Desire Kedagni

Economics Working Papers

This paper extends the identification results in Nevo and Rosen
(2012) to nonparametric models. We derive nonparametric bounds on the average
treatment effect when an imperfect instrument is available. As in Nevo and
Rosen (2012), we assume that the correlation between the imperfect instrument
and the unobserved latent variables has the same sign as the correlation
between the endogenous variable and the latent variables. We show that the
monotone treatment selection and monotone instrumental variable restrictions,
introduced by Manski and Pepper (2000, 2009), jointly imply this assumption.
We introduce the concept of comonotone instrumental variable, which also
satisfies this assumption ...

A Model To Explain Statewide Differences In Covid-19 Death Rates, James L. Doti

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

COVID-19 death rates per 100,000 vary widely across the nation. As of September 1, 2020, they range from a low of 4 in Hawaii to a high of 179 in New Jersey. Although academic research has been conducted at the county and metropolitan levels, no research has rigorously examined or identified the demographic and socioeconomic forces that explain state-level differences. This study presents an empirical model and the results of regression tests that help identify these forces and shed light on the role they play in explaining COVID-19 deaths.

A stepwise regression model we tested exhibits a high degree ...

The Role Of Dispersal And School Attendance On Reproductive Dynamics In Small, Dispersed Populations: Choyeros Of Baja California Sur, Mexico, Shane Macfarlan, Ryan Schacht, Eric Schniter, Juan José Garcia, Diego Guevara Beltran, Jory Lerback

ESI Publications

Individuals from small populations face challenges to initiating reproduction because stochastic demographic processes create local mate scarcity. In response, flexible dispersal patterns that facilitate the movement of individuals across groups have been argued to reduce mate search costs and inbreeding depression. Furthermore, factors that aggregate dispersed peoples, such as rural schools, could lower mate search costs through expansion of mating markets. However, research suggests that dispersal and school attendance are costly to fertility, causing individuals to delay marriage and reproduction. Here, we investigate the role of dispersal and school attendance on marriage and reproductive outcomes using a sample of 54 ...

The Looming Crisis In Antitrust Economics, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

As in so many areas of law and politics in the United States, antitrust’s center is at bay. It is besieged by a right wing that wants to limit antitrust even more than it has been limited over the last quarter century. On the left, it faces revisionists who propose significantly greater enforcement.

One thing the two extremes share, however, is denigration of the role of economics in antitrust analysis. On the right, the Supreme Court’s two most recent antitrust decisions at this writing reveal that economic analysis no longer occupies the central role that it once had ...

Undoing The Leges: Neoliberal Rationality And The United States Supreme Court, Emily Ann Donlevy

The Macksey Journal

The Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission was hailed by some as a victory for free speech and economic freedom, but others decried the outcome as a prioritization of corporate interests over the individual. What both groups failed to notice was that a shift had occurred in law itself: the content was no longer legal or political. Using the work of Wendy Brown and David Harvey, I will track the cause and implications of this shift. Brown describes the process of marketization, in which the content of the political is hollowed out and replaced ...

Interim Rationalizable Implementation Of Functions, Takashi Kunimoto, Rene Saran, Roberto Serrano

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper investigates rationalizable implementation of social choice functions (SCFs) in incomplete information environments. We identify weak interim rationalizable monotonicity (weak IRM) as a novel condition and show that weak IRM is a necessary and almost sufficient condition for rationalizable implementation. We show by means of an example that interim rationalizable monotonicity (IRM), found in the literature, is strictly stronger than weak IRM as its name suggests, and that IRM is not necessary for rationalizable implementation, as had been previously claimed. The same example also demonstrates that Bayesian monotonicity, the key condition for full Bayesian implementation, is not necessary for ...

A Taxonomy Of Non-Dictatorial Domains, Shurojit Chatterji, Huaxia Zeng

Research Collection School Of Economics

We provide an exhaustive classification of all preference domains that allow the design of unanimous social choice functions (henceforth, rules) that are non-dictatorial and strategy-proof. This taxonomy is based on a richness assumption and employs a simple property of two-voter rules called invariance. The preference domains that form the classification are semi-single-peaked domains (introduced by Chatterji et al. (2013)) and semi-hybrid domains (introduced here) which are two appropriate weakenings of the single-peaked domains, and which, more importantly, are shown to allow strategy-proof rules to depend on non-peak information of voters’ preferences. As a refinement of the classification, single-peaked domains and ...

Consistent Regional Commodity-By-Industry Input-Output Accounts, Randall Jackson, Péter Járosi

Regional Research Institute Working Papers

A long-standing regional science problem domain focuses on the identification of structural economic change. One of several approaches relies on the use of historical final demand series and a comparison of observed industry output to an estimate of what output would have been were economic structure static. However, these methods were first developed before the introduction of today’s commonly used commodity-by-industry (CxI)input-output (IO) accounting frameworks, and before the application of these methods to regional economies. Correctly formulating the supporting accounting structures for these analyses is essential, but can be challenging even for experienced an- alysts. Related textbook and ...

An Experimental Investigation Of Health Insurance Policy And Behavior, J. Dustin Tracy, Hillard Kaplan, Kevin A. James, Stephen Rassenti

ESI Working Papers

We introduce a new experimental approach to measuring the effects of health insurance policy alternatives on behavior and health outcomes over the life course. Cash-motivated subjects are placed in a virtual environment where they earn income and allocate it across multi-period lives. We compare behavior across age, income and insurance plans—one priced according to an individual’s expected cost and the other uniformly priced through employer-implemented cost sharing. We find that 1) subjects in the employer-implemented plan purchased insurance at higher rates; 2) the employer-based plan reduced differences due to income and age; 3) subjects in the actuarial plan ...

Adaptive Utility: Observing The Rate Of Adaptation In Happiness As Short Run Shifts Revert To Long Run Averages, Cameron Bellamoroso

Honors Thesis

In economics, human decision-making models are based on the utility, or happiness, a person experiences from the choices they make. Individual happiness is closely tied to societal and global well-being, a common political and and research goal. Psychological studies on happiness show that people generally return to an average level of happiness after experiencing a significant positive or negative change in their life, a process known as the ``hedonic treadmill.'' Empirically, it is often difficult for people to predict the specific utility they will experience from a given choice, leading them to maintain constant preferences for only frequently experienced options ...

An Elementary Humanomics Approach To Boundedly Rational Quadratic Models, Michael J. Campbell, Vernon L. Smith

ESI Working Papers

We take a refreshing new look at boundedly rational quadratic models in economics using some elementary modeling of the principles put forward in the book Humanomics by Vernon L. Smith and Bart J. Wilson. A simple model is introduced built on the fundamental Humanomics principles of gratitude/resentment felt and the corresponding action responses of reward /punishment in the form of higher/lower payoff transfers. There are two timescales: one for strictly self-interested action, as in economic equilibrium, and another governed by feelings of gratitude/resentment. One of three timescale scenarios is investigated: one where gratitude /resentment changes much more ...