Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Physical Decline Rates: Men Versus Women, Ray C. Fair

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper uses world records by age in running, swimming, and rowing to estimate a biological frontier of decline rates for both men and women. Decline rates are assumed to be linear in percent terms up to a certain age and then quadratic after that, where the transition age is estimated. For both men and women decline rates are smallest for rowing, followed by swimming and then running.

Decline rates for women are roughly the same as those for men for the short swimming events. They are slightly larger for the longer swimming events and for the rowing events. They …

Efficiency And Distributional Effects Of Federal College Subsidies During The Great Depression, Gerald Jaynes, Alexander B. Kane

Discussion Papers

We conduct the first quantitative assessment of federal college subsidies during the 1930s. Overlapping generation households invest in children’s education to maximize multigenerational utility, and the government subsidizes college to maximize enrollment subject to a budget constraint and recipients satisfying ability and income qualifications. A modelling innovation assigns children educational ability through a random regression to the population mean correlated with father’s presumed ability ranking via his percentile in fathers’ earnings distribution. Simulating the theoretical model, the equilibrium that replicates actual education distributions estimates federal college subsidies increased graduation rates of the cohort of White Americans reaching college age during …

Managing Persuasion Robustly: The Optimality Of Quota Rules, Dirk Bergemann, Tan Gan, Yingkai Li

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We study a sender-receiver model where the receiver can commit to a decision rule before the sender determines the information policy. The decision rule can depend on the signal structure and the signal realization that the sender adopts. This framework captures applications where a decision-maker (the receiver) solicit advice from an interested party (sender). In these applications, the receiver faces uncertainty regarding the sender’s preferences and the set of feasible signal structures. Consequently, we adopt a unified robust analysis framework that includes max-min utility, min-max regret, and min-max approximation ratio as special cases. We show that it is optimal for …

Leverage Cycle Theory Of Economic Crises And Booms, John Geanakoplos

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Traditionally, booms and busts have been attributed to investors' excessive or insufficient demand, irrational exuberance and panics, or fraud. The leverage cycle begins with the observation that much of demand is facilitated by borrowing, and that crashes often occur simultaneously with the withdrawal of lending.

Lenders are worried about default, and therefore attach credit terms like collateral or minimum credit ratings to their contracts. The credit surface, depicting interest rates as a function of the credit terms, emerges in leverage cycle equilibrium. Investors and lenders (and regulators) choose where on the credit surface they trade. The leverage cycle …

Review Of Fundraising For Impact, Meredith R. Evans Ph.D

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

In Fundraising for Impact, Kathryn K. Matthew uses soundbites from more than 100 interviews she conducted with practitioners from libraries, archives and museums from around the world to share ways they increased their funding. This work emphasizes frameworks that help reveal an institution's value and the impact of community, partnerships, investing and fundraising.

Review Of Bitstreams: The Future Of Digital Literary Heritage, Kara Watts-Engley

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Literary production has always been tied to specific developments in technology. This has become all the more apparent since the advent of personal computing and our digital media age. How might an awareness of technology’s impact then affect the future of literary creation, critique, and preservation? For Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage, this is among the core questions of literary, archival, and bibliographic studies in the contemporary digital media age.

"Causes And Consequences Of State Violence Against Civilians: The Rohingya Of Myanmar", C. Austin Davis, Paula Lopez, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, Jaya Y. Wen

Discussion Papers

While the United Nations describes Myanmar’s oppression of the Rohingya as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing” (UN, 2017), the state maintains that the violence was idiosyncratic and not motivated by anti-Rohingya animus. We assemble existing and original large-sample data to evaluate these claims. First, we document systematic economic motives: violence against minority civilians increased in places suitable for rice cultivation when rice prices were high. Correspondingly, in an original representative survey of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh we find substantial losses of agricultural land, inputs, and inventories. Next, using a vector auto-regression approach, we find that state violence was consistent …

Cost Based Nonlinear Pricing, Dirk Bergemann, Tibor Heumann, Stephen Morris

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

How should a seller offer quantity or quality differentiated products if they have no information about the distribution of demand? We consider a seller who cares about the "profit guarantee" of a pricing rule, that is, the minimum ratio of expected profits to expected social surplus for any distribution of demand.

We show that the profit guarantee is maximized by setting the price markup over cost equal to the elasticity of the cost function. We provide profit guarantees (and associated mechanisms) that the seller can achieve across all possible demand distributions. With a constant elasticity cost function, constant markup pricing …

Data On Deck: A Case Study Of A Historic Undersea Film And Video Digitization Project, Karen Urbec Mlis, Ca, Audrey Mickle Mlis, Lisa Raymond

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

In 2021, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Data Library and Archives (DLA), a part of the MBLWHOI (Marine Biological Laboratory Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) Library, received a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Recordings at Risk (RAR) program to catalog, digitize, preserve, and make available historic films and videos of Alvin, the first-of-its-kind manned submersible vessel that has shown us more of the deep ocean than had ever been possible and transformed our understanding of life on Earth.

These moving images have not been accessible to researchers and were far past the intended life cycle …

How Do Digital Advertising Auctions Impact Product Prices?, Alessandro Bonatti, Dirk Bergemann, Nicholas Wu

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We ask how the advertising mechanisms of digital platforms impact product prices. We present a model that integrates three fundamental features of digital advertising markets: (i) advertisers can reach customers on and off-platform, (ii) additional data enhances the value of matching advertisers and consumers, and (iii) bidding follows auction-like mechanisms. We compare data-augmented auctions, which leverage the platform’s data advantage to improve match quality, with managed campaign mechanisms, where advertisers’ budgets are transformed into personalized matches and prices through auto-bidding algorithms. In data-augmented second-price auctions, advertisers increase off-platform product prices to boost their competitiveness on-platform. This leads to socially efficient …

“It Was As Much For Me As For Anybody Else”: The Creation Of Self-Validating Records, Michelle Caswell, Anna Robinson-Sweet

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

How does it feel to create a record? What personal impact does it have to represent yourself in a record after being misrepresented in records created about you by someone else? Employing a participatory action research (PAR) research design alongside two community archives, this article answers these questions through empirical interview and focus group data collected from people who told and recorded their stories as part of participatory projects led by the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) and the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA). Across interview and focus group data with storytellers from both SAADA and TAVP, many participants …

From Archive To Anarchive: How Bereal Challenges Traditional Archival Concepts And Transforms Social Media Archival Practices, Mandi Li

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

BeReal, an “anti-Instagram” photo-sharing app, not only challenges the performative culture of social media but also revolutionizes the very concept of ‘archives.’ By employing the technical walkthrough method grounded in software studies, this research found that BeReal can be conceptualized as an anarchive that consists of diverse storytellers, decentralized micro-narratives, and interdependent contexts. More specifically, although some classical archival elements can be found in BeReal, the platform challenges the traditional archival industry in two ways: one, its ordinary record subjects and high level of accessibility shatter the centralization of traditional archives; two, it challenges the humanist value of archivists by …

Defining Archival Debt: Building New Futures For Archives, Jillian Cuellar, Audra Eagle Yun, Jennifer Meehan, Jessica Tai

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

As archivists surface and reckon with harmful theory and practice, how can we awaken to transcend past legacies? This article introduces and reflects on the concept of “archival debt,” defined as resources owed to address problematic legacy issues in an archival repository resulting from past practices, policies, and strategies that prioritized the protection and validation of institutions over democratic access and responsible stewardship. As a concept, archival debt amalgamates the myriad issues we now grapple with as a profession, including harmful or inadequate description, performative or competitive collecting, languishing backlogs, failure to recognize staff potential, shortsighted fund management, neglected constituencies, …

Panel Data Models With Time-Varying Latent Group Structures, Peter C. B. Phillips, Liangjun Su, Yiren Wang

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper considers a linear panel model with interactive fixed effects and unobserved individual and time heterogeneities that are captured by some latent group structures and an unknown structural break, respectively. To enhance realism the model may have different numbers of groups and/or different group memberships before and after the break. With the preliminary nuclear-norm-regularized estimation followed by row- and column-wise linear regressions, we estimate the break point based on the idea of binary segmentation and the latent group structures together with the number of groups before and after the break by sequential testing K-means algorithm simultaneously. It is shown …

Formalizing Dispute Resolution: Effects Of Village Courts In Bangladesh, Martin Mattsson, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak

Discussion Papers

Disagreements over business deals, land boundaries, or loan non-repayment are very common sources of disputes, and courts are congested in developing countries. We evaluate the effects of the government introducing formal “village courts” (VCs) in rural Bangladesh using a randomized controlled trial with a pre-analysis plan. VCs were designed to improve dispute resolution and relieve the pressure on congested district courts. We find that VCs are more of a substitute for the ubiquitous informal dispute resolution mechanism (DRM) called shalish. VCs become functional and active in treated areas, but shalish remains the primary preferred DRM in both treatment and …

New Asymptotics Applied To Functional Coefficient Regression And Climate Sensitivity Analysis, Qiying Wang, Peter C. B. Phillips, Ying Wang

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

A general asymptotic theory is established for sample cross moments of nonstationary time series, allowing for long range dependence and local unit roots. The theory provides a substantial extension of earlier results on nonparametric regression that include near-cointegrated nonparametric regression as well as spurious nonparametric regression. Many new models are covered by the limit theory, among which are functional coefficient regressions in which both regressors and the functional covariate are nonstationary. Simulations show finite sample performance matching well with the asymptotic theory and having broad relevance to applications, while revealing how dual nonstationarity in regressors and covariates raises sensitivity to …

Demand Estimation With Infrequent Purchases And Small Market Sizes, Ali Hortaçsu, Olivia R. Natan, Hayden Parsley, Timothy Schwieg, Kevin R. Williams

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We propose a demand estimation method that allows for a large number of zero sale observations, rich unobserved heterogeneity, and endogenous prices. We do so by modeling small market sizes through Poisson arrivals. Each of these arriving consumers solves a standard discrete choice problem. We present a Bayesian IV estimation approach that addresses sampling error in product shares and scales well to rich data environments. The data requirements are traditional market-level data as well as a measure of market sizes or consumer arrivals. After presenting simulation studies, we demonstrate the method in an empirical application of air travel demand.

Organizational Structure And Pricing: Evidence From A Large U.S. Airline, Ali Hortaçsu, Olivia R. Natan, Hayden Parsley, Timothy Schwieg, Kevin R. Williams

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Firms facing complex objectives often decompose the problems they face, delegating different parts of the decision to distinct sub-units. Using comprehen-sive data and internal models from a large U.S. airline, we establish that airline pricing is not well approximated by a model of the firm as a unitary decision-maker. We show that observed prices, however, can be rationalized by account-ing for organizational structure and the decisions by departments that are tasked with supplying inputs to the observed pricing heuristic. Simulating the prices the firm would charge if it were a rational unitary decision-maker results in lower welfare than we estimate …

To Open A Clearing: Cultivating Spaces Of Endurance In The Upper Amazon, Brunno De Melo Meirelles Douat

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

To effectively challenge the policies of extraction implemented by late liberal regimes, the Waorani communities from Upper Amazon have devised spatial strategies to defend their traditional territory. By re-examining the concept of the contact zone and unfolding settler and Indigenous literature, spatialities, and worldviews, this thesis suggests the concept of forest Clearings as a means to explore spatial forms of endurance.

Clearings emerge within the Amazon in sites where encounters between divergent worldviews embody otherwise modes of existence. Through a series of fieldwork reflections, these Clearings are perceived as spaces where ontological negotiations are more likely to occur, strategies of …

Operation Summer Care: Territories Of The Stewardship-Hospitality Complex, George Papamattheakis

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

Operation Summer Care studies the expanding interest that the hospitality industry takes in the biogeophysical environment. Natural surroundings have long been an essential operational precondition of tourism in the global sunbelt, but contemporary environmental anxieties increasingly motivate different strata of hosts to take a more active role in environmental management. Usually the domain of the state, biogeophysical entities and their spaces—plants and animals, sand formations, wetlands, entire ecosystems and protected areas—are measured, ordered, and managed by actors adjacent to the tourism industry. At the same time, the socio-technical mechanisms of environmental intervention and calculation are conveniently framed as practices of …

Rational Dialogues, John Geanakoplos, Heracles M. Polemarchakis

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Any finite conversation can be rationalized.

The People And The Experts: Alternative Views On Economic Affairs, William D. Nordhaus, Douglas Rivers

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Are speculators driving up oil prices? Should we raise energy prices to slow global warming? The present study takes a small number of such questions and compares the views of economic experts with those of the public. This comparison uses a panel of 2000+ respondents from YouGov with the views of the panel of experts from the IGM at the Chicago Booth School. We found that most of the US population is at best modestly informed about major economic questions and policies. The low level of knowledge is generally associated with the intrusion of ideological, political, and religious views that …

Affective Interdependence And Welfare, Aviad Heifetz, Enrico Minelli, Heracles M. Polemarchakis

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Purely affective interaction allows the welfare of an individual to depend on her own actions and on the profile of welfare levels of others. Under an assumption on the structure of mutual affection that we interpret as “non-explosive mutual affection,” we show that equilibria of simultaneous-move affective interaction are Pareto optimal independently of whether or not an induced standard game exists. Moreover, if purely affective interaction in-duces a standard game, then an equilibrium profile of actions is a Nash equilibrium of the game, and this Nash equilibrium and Pareto optimal profile of strategies is locally dominant.

Managed Campaigns And Data-Augmented Auctions For Digital Advertising, Dirk Bergemann, Alessandro Bonatti, Nicholas Wu

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We develop an auction model for digital advertising. A monopoly platform has access to data on the value of the match between advertisers and consumers. The platform support bidding with additional information and increase the feasible surplus for on-platform matches. Advertisers jointly determine their pricing strategy both on and off the platform, as well as their bidding for digital advertising on the platform. We compare a data-augmented second-price auction and a managed campaign mechanism. In the data-augmented auction, the bids by the advertisers are informed by the data of the platform regarding the value of the match. This results in …

Data, Competition, And Digital Platforms, Dirk Bergemann, Alessandro Bonatti

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We analyze digital markets where a monopolist platform uses data to match multiproduct sellers with heterogeneous consumers who can purchase both on and o§ the platform. The platform sells targeted ads to sellers that recommend their products to consumers and reveals information to consumers about their values. The revenueoptimal mechanism is a managed advertising campaign that matches products and preferences e¢ ciently. In equilibrium, sellers o§er higher qualities at lower unit prices on than o§ the platform. Privacy-respecting data-governance rules such as organic search results or federated learning can lead to welfare gains for consumers.

Dynamic Price Competition: Theory And Evidence From Airline Markets, Jose M. Betancourt, Ali Hortaçsu, Aniko Öry (Oery), Kevin R. Williams

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We introduce a model of dynamic pricing in perishable goods markets with competition and provide conditions for equilibrium uniqueness. Pricing dynamics are rich because both own and competitor scarcity affect future profits. We identify new competitive forces that can lead to misallocation due to selling units too quickly: the Bertrand scarcity trap. We empirically estimate our model using daily prices and bookings for competing U.S. airlines. We compare competitive equilibrium outcomes to those where firms use pricing heuristics based on observed internal pricing rules at a large airline. We find that pricing heuristics increase revenues (4-5%) and consumer surplus (3%).

Growing Like India. The Unequal Effects Of Service Lead Growth., Tianyu Fan, Michael Peters, Fabrizio Zilibotti

Discussion Papers

Structural transformation in most currently developing countries takes the form of a rapid rise in services but limited industrialization. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to structurally estimate productivity growth in service industries that circumvents the notorious difficulties in measuring quality improvements. In our theory, the expansion of the service sector is both a consequence—due to income effects—and a cause— due to productivity growth— of the development process. We estimate the model using Indian household data. We find that productivity growth in non-tradable consumer services such as retail, restaurants, or residential real estate, was an important driver of …

Review Of Archival Accessioning, Bree'ya Nadia Brown

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

In Archival Accessioning, editor Audra Eagle Yun and eleven authors compile essays on modern theories and practices to accessioning collections in archival settings. Authors in this anthology share knowledge and assert scenarios supporting their arguments, while also providing resources as guides for professionals who tackle the challenges of accessioning records and collections.

Incorporating Sales And Arrivals Information In Demand Estimation, Ali Hortaçsu, Olivia R. Natan, Hayden Parsley, Timothy Schwieg, Kevin R. Williams

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We propose a demand estimation method that allows for a large number of zero sale observations, rich unobserved heterogeneity, and endogenous prices. We do so by modeling small market sizes through Poisson arrivals. Each of these arriving con-sumers solves a standard discrete choice problem. We present a Bayesian IV estima-tion approach that addresses sampling error in product shares and scales well to rich data environments. The data requirements are traditional market-level data as well as a measure of market sizes or consumer arrivals. After presenting simulation studies, we demonstrate the method in an empirical application of air travel demand.

Policies, Projections, And The Social Cost Of Carbon: Results From The Dice-2023 Model, Lint Barrage, William D. Nordhaus

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

The present study examines the assumptions, modeling structure, and preliminary results of DICE-2023, the revised Dynamic Integrated Model of Climate and the Economy (DICE), updated to 2023. The revision contains major changes in the carbon and climate modules, the treatment of non-industrial greenhouse gases, discount rates, as well as updates on all the major components. The major changes are a significant reduction in the target for the optimal (cost-beneficial) temperature path, a lower cost of reaching the 2 °C target, an analysis of the impact of the Paris Accord, and a major increase in the estimated social cost of carbon.