Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Aggression In Mixed Martial Arts: An Analysis Of The Likelihood Of Winning A Decision, Trevor Collier, Andrew Johnson, John Ruggiero

Trevor Collier

Within the last decade, mixed martial arts has become one of the most popular sports worldwide. The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is the largest and most successful organization within the industry. In the USA, however, the sport is not sanctioned in all states because some politicians view the sport as too violent. The sport consists of many fighting forms and, unlike boxing, winning a decision requires judging in multiple facets including wrestling, boxing, kickboxing, and jiu-jitsu. In this study, we estimate the likelihood of winning a decision in the UFC. Using data on individual fights, we estimate the probability of …

Measuring Technical Efficiency In Sports, Trevor Collier, Andrew Johnson, John Ruggiero

Trevor Collier

Standard economic production theory is the basis for measuring technical efficiency in sports. Using programming or regression models, efficiency is defined as the distance of a given team observation from the technology. In this article, the authors show that the standard measures of efficiency using deterministic models are biased downward due to serial correlation with respect to the efficiency measure. In particular, if the number of observed wins for a given team is affected by the team’s inefficiency, it is necessarily true that another team is able to produce outside of the technology. As a result, the observed frontier is …

Estimation Of Multi-Output Production Functions In Commercial Fisheries, Trevor Collier, Andrew Mamula, John Ruggiero

Trevor Collier

Measuring the productivity of vessels in a multi-species fishery can be problematic. Typical regression techniques are not capable of handling multiple outputs while Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) tends to ignore the stochastic nature of production. Applied economists have devoted considerable time to this problem and have developed several methods of dealing with the issue of multiple output technologies in commercial fisheries. Our paper contributes to this literature by providing another method for estimating production functions of vessels operating in multi-species fisheries. We utilize a two-stage model – with data from the West Coast Limited Entry Groundfish Trawl Fishery – using …

The Relationship Between Output Variability And Growth: Evidence From Post War U.K. Data, Tony Caporale, Barbara Mckiernan

Tony Caporale

The paper investigates the relationship between output variability and economic growth using a GARCH-M model with industrial production in post-war Great Britain. The data reveals a positive relationship between variability and growth rates.

Mutual Fund Performance In A Nonsymmetrical World: A Case For The Upside Deviation, Ladd Kochman, Ravija Badarinathi

Ladd Kochman

A mathematical case is made for the upside deviation. When a portfolio's UD is divided by the market's UD, the resulting ratio facilitates another test of positive or negative skewness. However, a grater contribution of the prospective measure is that were DDp/DDm monitors a portfolio's control of downside deviations, UDp/UDm reflects the leverage from upside deviations.

Portfolio Evaluation, Downside Risk And An Anomaly, Ladd Kochman

Ladd Kochman

Owing to the developments in portfolio theory in the 1960s, the evaluation of portfolio performance has evolved from a return-only mentality to a process that makes risk no less important than return. Earliest efforts to combine the two dimensions into a single (or composite) measure belong to Treynor (1965) and Sharpe (1966), who suggested dividing a portfolio's return in excess of the risk-free rate by the portfolio's bets and standard deviation, respectively. When Fama (1972) recommended that portfolios pay premiums that capture both market and diversification risk, he was implicitly asking whether Jensen's (1968) use of beta sufficiently measures the …

Football Betting And The Neglected-Firm Effect: A Note, Ladd Kochman, David Waples

Ladd Kochman

To the extent that betting is analogous to investing, it seems fair to think that the football-betting market could provide a legitimate test of the neglected-firm effect. In the context of football-betting, neglect as a predictor variable appears to possess no special qualities. Even as the basis for a contrarian rule (that is, betting on teams that are least-neglected), the condition of being overlooked generated a W/B ratio (52.30 percent) that was unable to hurdle the 52.38-percent breakeven rate. Clearly, from a neglected-teams perspective, the football-betting market is efficient. A broader conclusion might be that the neglected-firm effect has little …

Market Efficiency And The Women's Nba, Ladd Kochman, Randy Goodwin

Ladd Kochman

The availability of point spreads for the past three WNBA seasons offers researchers an early opportunity to test the efficiency of the market for wagers on WNBA games. While the more mature betting markets for football, baseball and men's basketball have generally denied regular profits to participants, the unique and emerging nature of the WNBA would seem to warrant another look at the vulnerability of betting lines. By examining the efficiency of WNBA point spreads, this study is, to a large extent, testing the hypothesis that markets in the emerging stage lack the participation that ensures efficient pricing and thus …

Mandate And Paternalism: A Theory Of Large Elections, Marco Faravelli, Priscilla Man, Randall Walsh

Priscilla Man

Economy Of Mutuality: Merging Financial And Social Sustainability

kjackson@fordham.edu

The article posits the concept of economy of mutuality as an intellectual mediation space for shifts in emphasis between market and social structures within economic theory and practice. Economy of mutuality, it is contended, provides an alternative frame of reference to the dichotomy of market economy and social economy, for inquiry about what business is for and what values it presupposes and creates. The article centers around the objective of gaining a broadened understanding of business so as to include not just market economy, but social enterprise and social economy. In pursuit of this objective, a range of various archetypes …

Grading Standards And Education Quality, Raphael Boleslavsky, Christopher Cotton

Raphael Boleslavsky

We consider a game in which schools compete to place graduates by investing in education quality and by choosing grading policies. In equilibrium, schools strategically adopt grading policies that do not perfectly reveal graduate ability to evaluators (including employers and graduate schools). We compare equilibrium outcomes when schools grade strategically to equilibrium outcomes when evaluators perfectly observe graduate ability. With strategic grading, grades are less informative, and evaluators rely less on grades and more on a school's quality when assessing graduates. Consequently, under strategic grading, schools have greater incentive to invest in quality, and this can improve evaluator welfare.

Demonstrations And Price Competition In New Product Release, Raphael Boleslavsky, Christopher Cotton, Haresh Gurnani

Raphael Boleslavsky

We develop a game theoretic model of price competition in which an innovating firm can offer product demonstrations. Placing minimal restriction on the firm's ability to design demonstrations, we show that the equilibrium demonstration resolves some but not all customer valuation uncertainty and allows the innovating firm to attract customers while maintaining a high price. Consumer surplus may be lower with endogenous demonstrations than without demonstrations. Regulation requiring firms to provide fully-informative demonstrations (e.g., generous return policies or inspection periods) can further reduce consumer surplus. The ability to design demonstrations also creates incentives for innovating firms to limit the market …

Progressive Screening: Long Term Contracting With A Privately Known Stochastic Process, Raphael Boleslavsky, Maher Said

Raphael Boleslavsky

We examine a model of long-term contracting in which the buyer is privately informed about the stochastic process by which her value for a good evolves. In addition, the realized values are also private information. We characterize a class of environments in which the profit-maximizing long-term contract offered by a monopolist takes an especially simple structure: we derive sufficient conditions on primitives under which the optimal contract consists of a menu of deterministic sequences of static contracts. Within each sequence, higher realized values lead to greater quantity provision; however, an increasing proportion of buyer types are excluded over time, eventually …

Selloffs, Bailouts, And Feedback: Can Asset Markets Inform Policy?, Raphael Boleslavsky, David L. Kelly, Curtis R. Taylor

Raphael Boleslavsky

We present a model in which a policymaker observes trade in a financial asset before deciding whether to intervene in the economy, for example by offering a bailout or monetary stimulus. Because an intervention erodes the value of private information, informed investors are reluctant to take short positions and selloffs are, therefore, less likely and less informative. The policymaker faces a tradeoff between eliciting information from the asset market and using the information so obtained. In general she can elicit more information if she commits to intervene only infrequently. She thus may benefit from imperfections in the intervention process or …

A Unifying Impossibility Theorem, Priscilla Man, Shino Takayama

Priscilla Man

Don't Blame Faculty For High Tuition: The Annual Report On The Economic Status Of The Profession, 2003-04, Ronald Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] The bottom line is that although faculty and staff salary in-creases obviously contribute to increases in tuition, other factors have played more important roles during the last quarter century. These factors include the escalating costs of benefits for all employees, reductions in state support of public institutions, growing institutional financial-aid costs, expansion of the science and research infrastructure at research universities, and the increasing costs of information technology. If tuition and fee increases had been held to the rate of average faculty salary increases during this period, average tuition and fees would be substantially lower today in both the …

Does The Individual Mandate Force Individuals To Buy Insurance?, Raphael Boleslavsky, Sergio J. Campos

Raphael Boleslavsky

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act contains provisions which penalize individuals for failing to purchase health insurance. These provisions are commonly known as the "individual mandate." Both critics and supporters believe that the individual mandate forces individuals to buy health insurance, but supporters argue that this coercion is necessary. This term, the Supreme Court will address the constitutionality of the mandate, and this legal issue has sparked debate about the government's power to force individuals to purchase a private good. In this Essay we question the consensus that the individual mandate forces individuals to pay for health insurance. Using …

Information And Extremism In Elections, Raphael Boleslavsky, Christopher Cotton

Raphael Boleslavsky

We show that informative political campaigns can increase political extremism and decrease voter welfare. We present a model of elections in which candidate ideology is strategically selected prior to a campaign which reveals information about candidate quality. Documented means by which campaigns can harm voters are not present in our model; special interest groups, fundraising, and biased or private information are not part of the analysis. Even under these optimistic assumptions, we establish that informative campaigns have negative consequences. We discuss implications regarding media coverage, the number of debates, and campaign finance reform.

Exploratory Research Constructing A Conceptual Framework For Venture Capital In Regional Australia, Jeremy Buultjens, Margaret Drever, Stephen Kelly

Adjunct Professor Stephen J Kelly

No abstract provided.

Evolving Influence: Resolving Extreme Conflicts Of Interest In Advisory Relationships, Raphael Boleslavsky, Tracy Lewis

Raphael Boleslavsky

An advocate for a special interest provides advice to an uninformed planner for her to consider in making a sequence of decisions. Although the advocate may have valuable information for the planner, it is also known that the advocate is interested only in advancing his cause and will distort his advice in order to influence the planner's decision. Each time she repeats the problem, however, the planner learns about the accuracy of the advocate's recommendation, mitigating some of the advocate's incentive to act in a self-serving manner. We propose a theory to explain why planners do sometimes rely on information …

Dynamic Regulation Design Without Payments: The Importance Of Timing, Raphael Boleslavsky, David L. Kelly

Raphael Boleslavsky

We consider a two period model of optimal regulation of a firm subject to marginal compliance cost shocks. The regulator faces an asymmetric information problem: the firm knows current compliance costs, but the regulator does not. Both the regulator and the firm are uncertain about future costs. In our basic framework, the regulator may not offer payments to the firm; we show that the regulator can vary the strength of regulation over time to induce the firm to reveal its costs and increase welfare. In the optimal mechanism, the regulator offers stronger (weaker) regulation in the first period and weaker …

Existence Of Equilibrium In General Bertrand Games, José Fajardo, Guilherme Carmona

José Fajardo

No abstract provided.

Flying Passports Of Convenience, Karl T. Muth

Karl T Muth

This paper proposes an economic alternative to the legal construct of citizenship that currently dominates international law.

The Negotiated Guilty Plea: A Framework For Analysis, Richard Adelstein

Richard Adelstein

My dissertation of 1975, published by Garland Publishing in their series Outstanding Dissertations in Economics, 1984