Other Economics Commons^™

Feeder Cattle Future Price Spreads: Opportunities To Hedge?, Elliott James Dennis

Extension Farm and Ranch Management

First paragraph:

Feeder cattle future price spreads across all months have recovered to near pre-COVID-19 levels as quarantine restrictions and packing plant capacity issues have been mostly sorted out. For example, for the week of July 17, 2010 [sic], prices reached levels not seen since the beginning of March 2020. Pasture and corn progress are two factors that have the potential to push prices lower in the next coming months. Given current market conditions, producers have some options to lock in a margin.

Gamers Who Gamble: Examining The Relationship Between Esports Spectatorship And Event Wagering, Brett Abarbanel, Joseph Macey, Juho Hamari, Rolando Melton

Journal of Emerging Sport Studies

During recent years, while electronic sports (esports) has increasingly become a positive mainstream cultural phenomenon, it also may have several socio-economic implications, such as the growth of esports betting. Much like betting in sport, betting on esports has become a prominent form of gambling. However, there is still a paucity of knowledge on the demographic characteristics of this gambling cohort, particularly in regard to its relationship to video game play and spectatorship. In the present study, past-year video gamers (N = 1368) completed an online survey. Survey questions inquired about their esports event spectating, video game play, and esports betting behaviours ...

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 And Platform Monopoly, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

This article first considers an often-discussed question about large internet platforms that deal directly with consumers: Are they “winner take all,” or natural monopoly, firms? That question is complex and does not produce the same answer for every platform. The closer one looks at digital platforms they less they seem to be winner-take-all. As a result, we can assume that competition can be made to work in most of them.

Second, assuming that an antitrust violation is found, what should be the appropriate remedy? Breaking up large firms subject to extensive scale economies or positive network effects is generally thought ...

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, 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, 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 ...

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.

Introduction To The R-Package: Usdampr, Elliott James Dennis, Bowen Chen

Extension Farm and Ranch Management

Why the Need for the Package? In the 1990’s, concern over growing packer concentration and a hog industry market shock resulted in discontent among producers and packers. As a result, the United States Congress passed the Livestock Mandatory Reporting Act of 1999 (1999 Act) [Pub. L. 106-78, Title IX] which is required to be reauthorized every five years. See here for a full history of the Livestock Mandatory Reporting Background.

Market reports were publicly issued in the form of .txt files with varying frequency from April 2000 to April 2020. Current and historical data were also housed in a ...

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.

Business Powers Of Attorney For Nebraska Farm And Ranch Business Owners, J. David Aiken

Extension Farm and Ranch Management

This publication introduces the POA concept and discusses the Nebraska statutory form POA and its limitations. The purpose is to familiarize the reader with POAs, including their use and misuse, so that they can interact more effectively with their attorney in developing a POA, should they need one.

Disclaimer

This information is intended for educational purposes only; it must not be taken as legal advice or as a substitute for legal advice. If you have legal questions about developing and implementing a power of attorney for operating your business should you be unable to do so yourself, contact an attorney.

Utilizing Annual Forage Crops In Rotations, John Hewlett, Jay Parsons, Jeff Tranel

Extension Farm and Ranch Management

First paragraph

Approximately 60 million acres of forage are harvested annually in the United States, according to the National Agricultural Statistical Service (NASS). With lower commodity grain and oilseed prices along with high pasture rental rates and/or difficulty finding range and pasture to rent, some producers are considering ways to incorporate more forages into their crop rotations.

Changing Grid Premiums And Discounts Due To Underlying Changes In The Fed Cattle Industry, Elliott James Dennis

Extension Farm and Ranch Management

First paragraph:

In recent weeks there has been increased attention given to the role of Alternative Marketing Arrangements, commonly referred to as AMA's, in the fed cattle market. The use of these AMA’s varies greatly by region and some of the more common AMA’s used include grid and formula pricing. AMA’s pay producers premiums and discounts from a ‘base price’ based on a combination of the yield grade, quality grade, and weight of dressed cattle. It is common for the negotiated cash price to serve as the ‘base price’ for AMA’s using the either the ...

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 ...

Employment Income Drops In More Low-Income Than High-Income Households In All States, Michael P. Ettlinger, Jordan Hensley

The Carsey School of Public Policy at the Scholars' Repository

Low-wage workers are being hit much harder in the COVID-19 economic crisis than higher wage workers. This is evident in the much greater job loss in lower wage industries than higher wage industries.

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, 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, 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, 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 ...

Essays In Retirement Economics, Gunnar Poppe Yanez

All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters.

Chapter 1

The discrepancy between the high demand for annuities predicted by economic theory and the empirical low holdings of these assets, known as the annuity puzzle, is still not completely understood in economic studies of retirement finance. This paper assesses the effect of individuals' mortality risk learning process on annuitization. I isolate this effect by building a life-cycle model in which individuals have imperfect information of their true survival probability distribution, and therefore have to update their beliefs about it in a Bayesian manner. Using data on subjective mortality by the Health and ...