Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Essays In Sports Economics, Daniel Mark Chin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The study of economics is based on key concepts such as incentives, efficiency, marginality and tradeoffs. Economic research has hypothesized and tested for how economic agents behave after taking each of these into account. In order for agents to meet their objectives it is sometimes the case that they intentionally keep their behaviors out of sight. However, economic theory can be used to search for patterns of observed behaviors from which the unobserved behaviors can be inferred. This dissertation performs this kind of analysis by observing the behavior of sports participants.

Chapter 1 is an application of Becker's (1968) economic …

Choice, Management, & Modification: Situational Context In Risky Choice, Nathaniel K. Decker

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We sought to examine the potential differences between different types of risky decisions. While some decisions are easily represented as choices between future alternatives, other decisions may be better represented as the management of a personally owned situation. Schneider (2003) created the risk management task, which manifested these situated improvement decisions, and identified a unique pattern of risk preferences when compared to the standard gambling paradigm. To determine what cognitive processes might be differentially activated for each type of decisions so as to yield these risk preference differences, we incrementally manipulated the gambling paradigm to parse potentially influential elements of …