Economics Commons^™

Trust, Delegation, And Alignment In Human-Ai Decision Making, Erik O. Kimbrough, Brennan Mcdavid, Diba Vazirian

ESI Working Papers

This paper studies delegation to artificial intelligence in a setting where human principals retain the consequences of delegated choices. Participants wrote prompts instructing ChatGPT-4o mini how to choose on their behalf in three canonical economic domains: risky choice, intertemporal choice, and social allocation. We then elicited the compensation participants required to let the AI’s choices count for payment and compared participants’ own choices to choices generated from their prompts. The design produces two central empirical objects: a revealed measure of reluctance to delegate, captured by willingness to accept compensation for AI delegation, and a behavioral measure of alignment, captured by …

A Simulation Assessment Of The 'Law Of One Price', Caleb Wilkins

Computational and Data Sciences (MS) Theses

The ‘law of one price’ is an appealing notion regarding pricing of tradeable commodities that are priced in different currencies. It states that the prices of the same good in different markets should be equal after adjustment for exchange rates and that equality should persist through exchange rate fluctuations.

My research simulates the market conditions that should precipitate the ‘law of one price.’ Data was obtained from the simulated trade between algorithmic artificial intelligence agents that operated under induced boundedly rational market behaviors. Trade took place in two initially separate markets, a high-price market with a higher equilibrium price and …

External Debt In Sub-Saharan Africa: A Five Country Case Study On External Lending, Andres Ramirez

International Studies (MA) Theses

This thesis examines China as a new external lender to Africa and analyzes if their large infrastructure loans are leading developing countries into debt distress, compared to Multilateral and Commercial Private financing. A regression analysis is run on a 10-year data set, 2014-2024, and analyzes the external debt service-to-revenue ratio, relative to the external debt stock by lender, across a panel of five East and West African economies, Kenya, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Rwanda, and Benin. The empirical findings in the analysis shows that commercial private debt causes the most strain on a country’s external debt service to revenue ratio, but …

From Personal To Personalized Goals: How Goal Nudges Improve Production, Joaquín Gómez-Miñambres, Brice Corgnet, Roberto Hernán González

ESI Working Papers

We study how workers’ non-binding self-set goals affect their production and whether goal nudges (ability-calibrated goal hints) make goal setting more effective. In a real-effort task, participants first complete an ability pretest and are then assigned to one of three treatments: a no-goal baseline, a personal goal treatment with no external hint, or a personalized goal nudge that participants may accept or modify. We document a positive link between goals and production. However, merely asking workers to set goals is ineffective: when left unguided, workers anchor on conservative goals well below those induced by goal nudges, leading to underperformance. In …

Generosity After Negative Random Shocks, Hernán Bejarano, Joris Gillet, Ismael Rodriguez-Lara

ESI Working Papers

We report the results of three preregistered experiments examining the effects of negative random endowment shocks on generosity. Using a dictator game, we show that generosity is greater towards those who experience a negative random shock, and this effect is larger than the effect inequality has on giving. Our data provide evidence that people do not expect this additional level of generosity after a shock and that injunctive norms cannot explain it either. Taken together, our findings suggest that the (high) level of generosity observed after negative random shocks is unexpected and exceeds what people consider to be socially appropriate. …

Identity-Dependent Externalities Can Mitigate Overbidding In Tullock Contests: Theory And Evidence, Dan Kovenock, Jian Song, Francesco Trevisan

ESI Working Papers

We investigate how identity-dependent externalities infuence bidding behavior in Tullock lottery contests. While experimental studies of standard contests, in which losers are indiferent to the winner’s identity, consistently document overbidding, the role of identity-dependent preferences remains less explored. We address this gap by frst showing that the class of three-player Tullock lottery contests with identity-dependent externalities considered here can be mapped into a standard Tullock lottery contest with appropriately chosen prize valuations and endowments, yielding identical Nash equilibrium predictions. We then use this mapping to design a laboratory experiment that directly compares the two “equilibrium-equivalent” contest formats. In our three-player …

Do Voters Understand The Benefits Of Taxes?, Benjamin Carter, Alessandro Del Ponte, Peter Discioli

Political Science Faculty Articles and Research

We use economic experiments to study a fundamental question in political economy: Do voters understand the benefits of taxes? Participants play an economic game as members of a virtual society composed of computer players. In each round, the players earn low or high income, see the distribution of income, and then vote for low or high taxes. We test whether participants vote rationally for high taxes when poor and low taxes when rich, following a classic model in political economy, or whether they focus on the burden of taxes more than the benefits. Across three experiments, poor players voted against …

Conflict-Mediated Group Size Regulation: A Theory Of Supraoptimal And Suboptimal Group Size, Eric Schniter

ESI Working Papers

Observed group sizes rarely match the size that would maximize what each member gets from belonging. We propose a two-part theory in which group size is regulated by two related conflicts: insider-outsider conflict over admission, and within-group conflict as crowding, competition, and social tensions intensify with size. Three strategies are available: admission, exclusion, and fission. The first part shows that even when exclusion is unavailable, fission dynamics alone drive group size away from the optimum in both directions, with the pattern set by how prospective joiners encounter groups and by the geometry of fission. When joiners compare groups across a …

[Review Of] The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete For Wealth, Power And People, Steven Pfaff

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

A review of Paul Seabright's The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People.

The Dictatorial Public Goods Game, Gabriele Camera, Gary Charness, Nir Chemeya, Ro'i Zultan

ESI Working Papers

We propose a novel game, the Dictatorial Public Goods Game, to study the interplay between collective resource generation and centralized provision of public goods. After making choices in a standard Voluntary Contribution Mechanism (VCM), one player is selected from the group to administrate the contributions: either provide the public good or expropriate the collected resources for personal gain. We find that adding this centralized mechanism reduces efficiency compared to the standard VCM. Although higher contributions increase the material incentive to expropriate, they lead to more provision. Thus, pro-social choices in the contribution and in the provision stages act as …

More Than The Sum Of Its Sexes: Functional Constraints, Embodied Capital, And Age-Structured Labor In Human Forager Economies, Eric Schniter, Hillard Kaplan, Brenda Bowser, Cari Goetz

ESI Publications

"The paper's rough consensus attributes the SDoL to differential variance in food returns across male- and female-typical foraging domains, sourcing this primarily to Bird and Codding (2015) and Kelly's (2013) reframe of the classic 'hunting vs. gathering' axis as 'risky vs. non-risky foraging.' Indeed, the data show that males more often pursue large game and honey, resources that yield higher caloric returns but with high unpredictability, injury risk, and failure rates. Females, especially those with dependent young, more often target plant foods and small game that produce steadier, lower-variance returns. But variance-buffering is a proximate ecological account, not a life …

Centralization Vs. Decentralization: First Evidence From The Laboratory, Gabriele Camera, Gary Charness, Nir Chemaya

ESI Working Papers

The future architecture of financial systems is a subject of contention, with centralized and decentralized governance proponents. Here we ask: would the architecture affect the quality of decision-making? We propose a game where financial network participants demarcate the ownership of claims to income. This governance task can be decentralized (shared authority), centralized (single authority), or hybrid (alternating authority). Without communication all architectures supported poor outcomes. With communication, decentralization ensured good governance and maximum profits, while centralization did not—lowering communication’s potency in promoting socially optimal decisions. This indicates there is scope for decentralization in innovating financial institutions.

The Marginal Sexual Equality Game: Defining The Incentives For Sexual Equality Using Economic Game Theory And Butler’S Gender Trouble, Blaise Bowers

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This project takes an interdisciplinary economic and gender studies approach to explain subversion, sexual equality, and the marginal nature of sexual rights. The project uses advanced economic game theory to derive the Marginal Sexual Equality Game Formula. The formula explains the various political-economic incentives for a minority gender/sexual identity’s subversion of dominance, a dominant sex's incentive to suppress, the impact of cooperation versus division among minority genders/sexual identities, incentives and impacts of cooperation between sects of minority genders/sexual identities and the dominant gender/sexual identity, and the various consequences of various social mobility and elasticity. Additionally, the formula proves and showcases …

Ai Is Taking Over!: A New Generation Of Unemployment Fears, Amaya V. Hepburn

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The growing panic surrounding AI taking over the workforce is strong in a distinct group of demographics, in contrast to the fear of computers taking over the workforce that was seen in previous generations. This suggests that AI developments have sparked a wave of fear that is unlike the fear of tech developments in the past. I have discovered that this fear is prevalent across several demographics: age, employment, and income. By cross-analyzing through the 2017 and 2025 fear surveys, I discovered that fear of AI is more prevalent in younger generations and is more threatening to students entering the …

Gender And Grades: The Gap In How Men And Women Fear Economic Collapse, Riley O'Connor

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Due to prescribed gender roles in society and wage gaps, historically, women have had to rely on spouses and family for economic survival. Now, with access to higher education and increased salaries, their economic fears are shifting. In this paper I analyze the extent of the gender gap in the fear of economic and financial collapse of Americans. Using the Chapman Survey of American Fear, an original data set surveying the degree to which American adults fear incidents collected in spring of 2025, men and women of the same education fear economic collapse differently, signifying men fear economic collapse less …

Information Aggregation In Decision Markets Under A Modified Hanson Market Maker, Leo Vershel

Behavioral and Computational Economics (MS) Theses

In this paper, we report the results of experiments where subjects participate in a prediction market utilizing the Hanson automated market maker. The key distinction of our environment when compared with previous studies in the prediction market space is in the introduction of a conditional market that allows subjects to make conscious decisions to infuence market outcomes, and thus it investigates the quality of the decisions made by the subjects as opposed to the accuracy of the market prices. Utilizing dispersed “not-state” information, we evaluate whether subjects can accurately infer true states and maximize organizational welfare. Our initial baseline results …

A Counterfactual Analysis Of The Impact Of Stock Market Absence On Economic Growth In Selected Sub-Saharan African Countries, Etsub Tekola Jemberu, Adriana Knápková, Bruce Dehning

Accounting Faculty Articles and Research

Despite the global expansion of financial markets as a strategy for financial reform over the past century, around one-sixth of the world’s countries lack a formal stock market. This paper provides novel evidence from nine sub-Saharan African countries on how the absence of stock markets impacts economic growth. Using the synthetic control method (SCM), we estimate the counterfactual GDP per capita these countries would have experienced had they established a stock market during 1993–1995. The findings reveal that the absence of a stock market resulted in substantial losses for most countries, including Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Comoros, Guinea, …

Segmentation And Morphometry Of Intracranial Internal Carotid Artery Calcification In Relation To Brain Atrophy, Xiao Xu, Nikhil N. Chaudhari, Phoebe E. Imms, Nahian F. Chowdhury, Fangyun C. Liu, Jorge A. Solis Galvan, Bavrina Bigjahan, Grant Schleifer, Maria Ashna, Blake Hannagan, Giuseppe Barisano, Daniel K. Cummings, Daniel Eid Rodriguez, Paul L. Hooper, Edmond Seabright, Randall C. Thompson, Benjamin C. Trumble, Michael D. Gurven, Jonathan Stieglitz, Caleb E. Finch, M. Linda Sutherland, James D. Sutherland, Helena C. Chui, Margaret Gatz, Wendy J. Mack, Hillard Kaplan, Andrei Irimia

ESI Publications

Purpose

Intracranial internal carotid artery calcification (iICAC) is a form of intracranial arteriosclerosis and is associated with an elevated risk of stroke and dementia. However, iICAC’s relationship with brain atrophy remains poorly understood. We aimed to automatically quantify iICAC morphometric characteristics and evaluate their associations with regional brain volumes (BVs).

Methods

We developed an automated approach to compute iICAC surface area and thickness from CT brain scans in a sample of physically active South American subsistence farmers (n = 1,232, age range: 40 years to 92 years, 48.1% female, 794 Tsimane and 438 Moseten). Linear regression models were used …

On The Origins Of Modern East Asia: Knowledge And The Economic Transformation Of Japan And China In The Late 19th Century, Debin Ma, Jared Rubin, Weiwen Yin

ESI Working Papers

This paper revisits the old thesis of the contrasting paths of modernization between Japan and China. It develops a new analytical framework regarding the role of knowledge acquisition (propositional vs. prescriptive) and political centralization as the key drivers behind these contrasting paths. Our model and historical data highlight how the introduction of these elements contributed to Meiji Japan’s decisive turn towards the West and Qing China’s lethargic response to Western imperialism. Our analytical framework, developed from a comparative historical narrative and quantitative data, sheds new light on the importance of knowledge acquisition in enabling developing countries to reach the world’s …

Markets, Agency, And Trust: Ai Agents And The Knowledge Problem, Brennan Mcdavid, Lynne Kiesling, David Chassin

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming market participation, raising key epistemological questions: Do AI agents enhance or diminish the aggregation of local, private, and tacit knowledge Hayek saw as essential to market processes? How does trust in both markets and AI shape willingness to engage in AI-mediated exchange? This paper examines these issues through market epistemology, agency relationships, and trust epistemology, analyzing how agentic AI reshapes the knowledge problem and principal-agent dynamics. Applying this framework to transactive energy markets, we show that AI shifts decision-making from human cognition to algorithmic processes that require user trust despite epistemic opacity, although it is …

Stated Preferences For Public Provision Of Services: Experimental Evidence From Latin America, Hernán Bejarano, Matias Busso, Juan Francisco Santos

ESI Working Papers

We study how individuals in six Latin American countries value public versus private provision of education and healthcare using a survey experiment. Respondents were randomly assigned to vignettes that vary income, service quality, and provider type. Reported service quality is the main driver of choices: the probability of selecting a private provider roughly doubles when reported quality of the public option falls from 80 to 20 percent, while income has a smaller effect. Higher institutional trust lowers the likelihood of switching to private providers but does not affect willingness to pay once individuals choose private provision.

Existence Of Equilibrium Mechanisms In Generalized Principal-Agent Problems With Interacting Teams, Brian Roberson

ESI Working Papers

We study incentive design when multiple principals simultaneously design mechanisms for their respective teams in environments with strategic spillovers. In this environment, each principal’s set of incentive-compatible mechanisms—those that satisfy their own agents’ incentive compatibility constraints— depends on the mechanisms offered by the other teams. Following a classic example by Myerson (1982), such games may lack equilibrium due to discontinuities in the correspondence of incentive-compatible mechanisms. We establish general conditions for equilibrium existence by introducing a novel approach that involves tracking both the outcome distributions along the truthful-obedient path and the sets of outcome distributions achievable through unilateral deviations, thereby …

Authoritarianism And Conspiracism Around The World, Valerie Capraro, Folca Panizza, Joseph A. Vitriol, Mikey Biddlestone, Andrè Krouwel, Yordan Kutiyski, Alberto López Ortega, Ana Ebert, Max Wan, Praveen Kujal, Karen M. Douglas, Christopher M. Federico, Jolanda Jetten, Sander Van Der Linden, Flávio Azevedo

ESI Working Papers

Authoritarian leaders frequently deploy conspiracy narratives to justify power concentration and delegitimize opponents, yet the link between authoritarianism and conspiracism remains underresearched. Integrating data across six studies from multiple international surveys (N=63,403; 20 countries), expert-coded party systems (71 countries; 14 datasets), and longitudinal panel studies, we demonstrate that individuals with stronger authoritarian orientations are consistently more prone to conspiracism across diverse cultures, political contexts, and time. These results remain robust when controlling for populist attitudes and multiple political, psychological, and demographic variables. The link between authoritarianism and conspiracism appears to constitute a durable and generalizable psychological relationship. This may help …

High Prevalence Of Cerebrovascular Calcifications And Clinical Correlates In Indigenous Bolivian Forager‐Horticulturalists: A Population‐Based Observational Study, Giuseppe Barisano, Bavrina Bigjahan, Grant Schleifer, Maria Ashna, Wendy J. Mack, M. Linda Sutherland, James D. Sutherland, Helena C. Chui, Meng Law, Thomas J. Fischbach, Andrei Irimia, Nikhil N. Chaudhari, Daniel K. Cummings, Paul L. Hooper, Jacob E. Aronoff, Ellen E. Walters, Daniel Eid Rodriguez, Raul Quispe Gutierrez, Jesus Bani Cuata, Kenneth Buetow, Caleb E. Finch, Michael D. Gurven, Jonathan Stieglitz, Gregory S. Thomas, Randall C. Thompson, Benjamin Trumble, Hillard Kaplan, Margaret Gatz

ESI Publications

Background

Methods

For Whom Do Labels Work? Heterogeneous Effects Of Popularity And Environmental Information In Coffee Choice, Dede Long, Joaquín Gómez-Miñambres, Hongxing Liu

ESI Publications

We examine the impact of two common food labels on consumers’ choices: environmental certification and popularity cues. In a randomized experiment, participants chose between two similar coffee products, with treatments varying the presence of environmental and/or popularity information. We also collected measures of conformity preferences, environmental concern, political identity, and demographics. At the aggregate level, the environmental and combined labels significantly increased the selection of the target coffee, whereas popularity information alone had no effect. These averages conceal substantial heterogeneity: high-conformity participants responded to all labels, especially popularity cues, while those with domain-specific environmental concerns responded only to environmental and …

Higher Growth Rate In The California Manufacturing Sector In The First Quarter Of 2026, Anderson Center For Economic Research

Anderson Center Press Releases

No abstract provided.

Oxytocin Varies Across The Life Course In A Sex-Specific Way In A Human Subsistence Population, Abigail E. Colby, Dominik C. Jud, Valerie Baettig, Jordan S. Martin, Camila Scaff, Michael D. Gurven, Benjamin C. Trumble, Bret A. Beheim, Paul L. Hooper, Daniel K. Cummings, Hillard Kaplan, Jonathan Stieglitz, Arnulfo Cary Ista, Adrian V. Jaeggi

ESI Publications

Oxytocin, a hormone linked to reproduction and health, may mediate life-history trade-offs across the human life course. Yet, how oxytocin naturally varies with age remains poorly understood. Here, working with the Tsimane, forager-horticulturalists of lowland Bolivia, we collected the largest sample of oxytocin measurements to date (n = 1,242 samples, n = 405 individuals, age = 2 to 84 y, 51% female), and i) examined how oxytocin varies throughout the life course in females and males, and ii) investigated potential drivers of age- and sex-specific variation. Our sample provides rare insight into the relationship between oxytocin and age in a …

Contests With Ambiguous Prizes, Cary Deck, Aidan Hathaway, Emma Kate Henry, Tigran Melkonyan, Samuel Redinger

ESI Working Papers

This paper examines behavior in contests where the prize value is ambiguous. We develop a theoretical model of bidding in a Tullock contest with an ambiguous prize where contestants account for the ambiguity attitude of their rival. Ambiguity affects optimal behavior via two countervailing channels - a direct effect arising from contestants’ ambiguity about the value of the prize and an indirect effect corresponding to the effect of ambiguity on the opponent’s behavior. Using a controlled laboratory experiment, we elicit individual risk and ambiguity attitudes and compare predicted and observed behavior in contests with an ambiguous prize, a risky prize …

Strategic Interactions And Gender Cues: Evidence From Social Preference Games, Hernán Bejarano, Matias Busso, Juan Francisco Santos

ESI Working Papers

This paper studies trust, reciprocity, and bargaining using a large-scale online experiment conducted in six Latin American countries. Participants played trust and ultimatum games under randomly assigned conditions in which the gender of their counterpart was either disclosed or withheld. On average, disclosing counterpart gender does not yield statistically detectable effects in either game. However, statistically significant differences emerge by participants' own gender: on average men exhibit higher levels of trust, reciprocity, and generosity in bargaining than women. When disaggregating by participant-counterpart gender pairings, point estimates differ in sign across groups but are generally imprecisely estimated, and differences between interacting …

Dictators And Lying Dictators: An Experimental Investigation Of Preference Based-Group Biases In Chinese And American Interactions, Aaron S. Berman, Saika Cer Askin, Shapeng Jiang, David Porter, Jason Shachat

ESI Working Papers

This study examines preference-based behavioral biases in social interactions between two distinct communities: students from Chapman University in the United States and Wuhan University in China. Using controlled experiments, participants interacted within or across communities in Dictator games. Two versions of the Dictator game were used: one where decisions were observable by both the experimenter and the recipient, and another where allocators could misreport outcomes with plausible deniability. Results revealed unexpected patterns, including similar allocation distributions across communities in the transparent task, and differing behaviors in the misreporting task, with Chapman allocators being more generous to out-group members and Wuhan …