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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Economics Works! Experiments In High School Classrooms, Stephen L. Jackstadt, Paul Johnson, Bart J. Wilson Apr 2008

Economics Works! Experiments In High School Classrooms, Stephen L. Jackstadt, Paul Johnson, Bart J. Wilson

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

Economic experiments are a unique form of active learning. Students apply the scientific method by testing hypotheses and discovering for themselves how markets work. The authors conducted teacher training courses in experimental economics over a three-year period and conducted surveys to track teachers' adoption of classroom experiments. This paper discusses the survey results and describes how the training was revised accordingly. The primary conclusion of this article is that classroom experiments must be compatible with the school environment; that is, they should emphasize non-monetary incentives and hand-run experiments as well as be explicitly tied to school curricula.


Another Example Of A Credit System That Coexists With Money, Gabriele Camera, Yiting Li Jan 2008

Another Example Of A Credit System That Coexists With Money, Gabriele Camera, Yiting Li

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

We study an economy in which exchange occurs pairwise, there is no commitment, and anonymous agents choose between random monetary trade or deterministic credit trade. To accomplish the latter, agents can exploit a costly technology that allows limited recordkeeping and enforcement. An equilibrium with money and credit is shown to exist if the cost of using the technology is sufficiently small. Anonymity, record-keeping and enforcement limitations also permit some incidence of default, in equilibrium.


Electoral Poaching And Party Identification, Dan Kovenock, Brian Roberson Jan 2008

Electoral Poaching And Party Identification, Dan Kovenock, Brian Roberson

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

This article studies electoral competition in a model of redistributive politics with deterministic voting and heterogeneous voter loyalties to political parties. We construct a natural measure of `party strength' based on the sizes and intensities of a party's loyal voter segments and demonstrate how party behavior varies with the two parties' strengths. In equilibrium, parties target or `poach' a strict subset of the opposition party's loyal voters: offering those voters a high expected transfer, while `freezing out' the remainder with a zero transfer. The size of the subset of opposition voters frozen out and, consequently, the level of inequality in …


Experimental Gasoline Markets, Cary A. Deck, Bart J. Wilson Jan 2008

Experimental Gasoline Markets, Cary A. Deck, Bart J. Wilson

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

Zone pricing in wholesale gasoline markets is a contentious topic in the public policy debate. With a controlled laboratory experiment, we investigate the competitive effects of zone pricing on consumers, retail stations, and refiners vis-à-vis the proposed policy prescription of uniform wholesale pricing to retailers. We also examine the issue of divorcement and the “rockets and feathers” phenomenon. The former is the legal restriction that refiners and retailers cannot be vertically integrated, and the latter is the perception that retail gasoline prices rise faster than they fall in response to random walk movements in the world price for oil.


Interior Optima And The Inada Conditions, C. D. Aliprantis, Gabriele Camera, F. Ruscitti Jan 2008

Interior Optima And The Inada Conditions, C. D. Aliprantis, Gabriele Camera, F. Ruscitti

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

We present a new proof of the interiority of the policy function based on the Inada conditions. It is based on supporting properties of concave functions.