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Full-Text Articles in Behavioral Economics

Applicant Screening And Performance-Related Outcomes, Fali Huang, Peter Cappelli May 2010

Applicant Screening And Performance-Related Outcomes, Fali Huang, Peter Cappelli

Research Collection School Of Economics

A fundamental problem faced by employers is how to elicit effort from employees. Most economic models suggest that employers meet this challenge by monitoring employees carefully to prevent shirking. But there is another option that relies on heterogeneity across employees, and that is to screen job candidates to find workers with a stronger work ethic who require less monitoring. We might therefore expect employers who screen candidates more intensively to monitor them less. Using data from a national sample of US employers, we find that employers who screen applicants more intensively for factors that should predict work ethic also monitor …


Dynamic Treatment Effect Analysis Of Tv Effects On Child Cognitive Development, Fali Huang, Myoung-Jae Lee Apr 2010

Dynamic Treatment Effect Analysis Of Tv Effects On Child Cognitive Development, Fali Huang, Myoung-Jae Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

We investigate whether TV watching at ages 6-7 and 8-9 affects cognitive development measured by math and reading scores at ages 8-9, using a rich childhood longitudinal sample from NLSY79. Dynamic panel data models are estimated to handle the unobserved child-specific factor, endogeneity of TV watching, and dynamic nature of the causal relation. A special emphasis is placed on the last aspect, where TV watching affects cognitive development, which in turn affects future TV watching. When this feedback occurs, it is not straightforward to identify and estimate the TV effect. We develop a two-stage estimation method which can deal with …


Does Television Viewing Affect Children's Behaviour?, Fali Huang, Myoung-Jae Lee Feb 2010

Does Television Viewing Affect Children's Behaviour?, Fali Huang, Myoung-Jae Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

Using three-period panel data drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we investigate whether television (TV) viewing at ages 6–7 and 8–9 years affects children's social and behavioural development at ages 8–9 years. Dynamic panel data models are estimated to handle the unobserved child-specific factor, endogeneity of TV viewing, and the dynamic nature of the causal relation. Special emphasis is placed on this last aspect, focusing on how early TV viewing affects interim child behavioural problems and in turn affects future TV viewing. Overall, we find that TV viewing during ages 6–7 and 8–9 years increases child behavioural …


Obedience, Schooling, And Political Participation, Davin Chor, Filipe R. Campante Jan 2010

Obedience, Schooling, And Political Participation, Davin Chor, Filipe R. Campante

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper proposes a framework for understanding the joint evolution of cultural norms and human capital investment, and how these affect patterns of political participation. We first present some empirical evidence that cultural attitudes towards obedience systematically influence an individual's propensity to engage in different political activities: obedience discourages more confrontational modes of political activity (such as public demonstrations), while raising participation in non-confrontational civic acts (such as voting). These cultural attitudes further appear to be determined in part by cultural transmission across generations. Motivated by this evidence, we develop a dynamic model in which human capital and obedience are …


Directed Altruism And Enforced Reciprocity In Social Networks, Stephen Leider, Markus M. Mobius, Tanya Rosenblat, Quoc-Anh Do Nov 2009

Directed Altruism And Enforced Reciprocity In Social Networks, Stephen Leider, Markus M. Mobius, Tanya Rosenblat, Quoc-Anh Do

Research Collection School Of Economics

We conducted online field experiments in large real-world social networks in order to decompose prosocial giving into three components: (1) baseline altruism toward randomly selected strangers, (2) directed altruism that favors friends over random strangers, and (3) giving motivated by the prospect of future interaction. Directed altruism increases giving to friends by 52% relative to random strangers, whereas future interaction effects increase giving by an additional 24% when giving is socially efficient. This finding suggests that future interaction affects giving through a repeated game mechanism where agents can be rewarded for granting efficiency-enhancing favors. We also find that subjects with …


Why Did Universities Precede Primary Schools? A Political Economy Model Of Educational Change, Fali Huang Nov 2009

Why Did Universities Precede Primary Schools? A Political Economy Model Of Educational Change, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Universities were first established in Europe around the twelfth century, while primary schools did not appear until the nineteenth. This paper accounts for this phenomenon using a political economy model of educational change on who are educated (the elite or the masses) and what is taught (general or specific/vocational education). A key assumption is that general education is more effective than specific education in enhancing one’s skills in a broad range of tasks, including political rent-seeking. Its findings suggest that specific education for the masses is compatible with the elite rule, while mass general education is not, which refines the …


Estimation Of Bidder Valuations In An Fcc Spectrum Auction, Jungwon Yeo Sep 2009

Estimation Of Bidder Valuations In An Fcc Spectrum Auction, Jungwon Yeo

Research Collection School Of Economics

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) uses auctions to allocate radio spectrum frequencies to wireless service providers. The innovation of the auction design is that it offers many heterogeneous licenses simultaneously in one ascending auction. This paper develops an empirical model and procedure to estimate bidder valuations. Given that the complex nature of the auction does not admit formal modeling in a general setting, I do not explore a particular model of equilibrium bidding. Instead, I propose two revealed preference inequalities which should hold in any reasonable model of these auctions. The .rst inequality requires that a bidder never bids on …


What Do We Expect From Our Friends?, Stephen Leider, Markus M. Mobius, Tanya S. Rosenblat, Quoc-Anh Do Jun 2009

What Do We Expect From Our Friends?, Stephen Leider, Markus M. Mobius, Tanya S. Rosenblat, Quoc-Anh Do

Research Collection School Of Economics

We conduct a field experiment in a large real-world social network to examine how subjects expect to be treated by their friends and by strangers who make allocation decisions in modified dictator games. Although recipients’ beliefs accurately account for the extent to which friends will choose more generous allocations than strangers (i.e., directed altruism), recipients are not able to anticipate individual differences in the baseline altruism of allocators (measured by giving to an unnamed recipient, which is predictive of generosity toward named recipients). Recipients who are direct friends with the allocator, or even recipients with many common friends, are no …


Auction Design And Tacit Collusion In Fcc Spectrum Auctions, Patrick Bajari, Jungwon Yeo Jun 2009

Auction Design And Tacit Collusion In Fcc Spectrum Auctions, Patrick Bajari, Jungwon Yeo

Research Collection School Of Economics

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has used auctions to award spectrum since 1994. During this time period, the FCC has experimented with a variety of auctions rules including click box bidding and anonymous bidding. These rule changes make the actions of bidders less visible during the auction and also limit the set of bids that can be submitted during a particular round. Economic theory suggests that tacit collusion may be more difficult as a result. We examine this proposition using data from four auctions: the PCS-C Block, the PCS-C&F Block Reauction, the Advanced Wireless Service auction and the 700 MHz …


What Do We Expect From Our Friends?, Stephen Leider, Markus M. Mobius, Tanya S. Rosenblat, Quoc-Anh Do Jan 2009

What Do We Expect From Our Friends?, Stephen Leider, Markus M. Mobius, Tanya S. Rosenblat, Quoc-Anh Do

Research Collection School Of Economics

We conduct a field experiment in a large real-world social network to examine how subjects expect to be treated by their friends and by strangers who make allocation decisions in modified dictator games. While recipients’ beliefs accurately account for the extent to which friends will choose more generous allocations than strangers (i.e. directed altruism), recipients are not able to anticipate individual differences in the baseline altruism of allocators (measured by giving to an unnamed recipient, which is predictive of generosity towards named recipients). Recipients who are direct friends with the allocator, or even recipients with many common friends, are no …


Global Analysis Of An Expectations Augmented Evolutionary Dynamics, Angelo Antoci, Antonio Gay, Massimiliano Landi, Pier Luigi Sacco Dec 2008

Global Analysis Of An Expectations Augmented Evolutionary Dynamics, Angelo Antoci, Antonio Gay, Massimiliano Landi, Pier Luigi Sacco

Research Collection School Of Economics

We consider a deterministic evolutionary model where players form expectations about future play. Players are not fully rational and have expectations that change over time in response to current payoffs and feedback from the past. We provide a complete characterization of the qualitative dynamics so induced for a two strategy population game, and relate our findings to standard evolutionary dynamics and equilibrium selection when agents have rational forward looking expectations.


Directed Altruism And Enforced Reciprocity In Social Networks, Stephen Leider, Markus M. Mobius, Tanya S. Rosenblat, Quoc-Anh Do Nov 2008

Directed Altruism And Enforced Reciprocity In Social Networks, Stephen Leider, Markus M. Mobius, Tanya S. Rosenblat, Quoc-Anh Do

Research Collection School Of Economics

We conducted online field experiments in large real-world social networks in order to decompose prosocial giving into three components: (1) baseline altruism toward randomly selected strangers, (2) directed altruism that favors friends over random strangers, and (3) giving motivated by the prospect of future interaction. Directed altruism increases giving to friends by 52% relative to random strangers, whereas future interaction effects increase giving by an additional 24% when giving is socially efficient. This finding suggests that future interaction affects giving through a repeated game mechanism where agents can be rewarded for granting efficiency-enhancing favors. We also find that subjects with …


The More Kids, The Less Mom's Divvy: Impact Of Childbirth On Intrahousehold Resource Allocation, Tomoki Fujii, Ryuichiro Ishikawa Oct 2008

The More Kids, The Less Mom's Divvy: Impact Of Childbirth On Intrahousehold Resource Allocation, Tomoki Fujii, Ryuichiro Ishikawa

Research Collection School Of Economics

We investigate how the impact of childbirth on intrahousehold allocation for married Japanese couples. We developed reduced‐form and structural‐form specifications from a unified theoretical framework. Under a weak set of assumptions, we can focus on private goods to track the changes in intrahousehold resource allocation. Our estimation results show that that allocation of resources within household tend to move to the disadvantage of women after a childbirth. One additional child is associated with a reduction in the wife's private expenditure share. Our estimation results reject the income-pooling hypothesis, and show that women are more risk averse than men.


Utility Functions, Future Consumption Targets And Subsistence Thresholds, Ashok Guha, Brishti Guha Oct 2008

Utility Functions, Future Consumption Targets And Subsistence Thresholds, Ashok Guha, Brishti Guha

Research Collection School Of Economics

If the consumer’s risk aversion behavior varies intertemporally and if the risk aversion coefficient on future consumption becomes very large, the consumer tends to aim at a fixed future consumption target. A by-product is a reinterpretation of subsistence theories of consumption.


Indescribability And Asymmetric Information At The Contracting Stage, Takashi Kunimoto May 2008

Indescribability And Asymmetric Information At The Contracting Stage, Takashi Kunimoto

Research Collection School Of Economics

Maskin and Tirole [Maskin, E., Tirole, J., 1999. Unforeseen contingencies and incomplete contracts. Review of Economic Studies, 66, 83–114] show that indescribability does not matter for contractual incompleteness when there is symmetric information both at the contracting stage and at the trading stage. Following their setup, I show that with asymmetric information at both stages, indescribability can matter.


Target Saving In An Overlapping Generations Model, Brishti Guha, Ashok S. Guha Mar 2008

Target Saving In An Overlapping Generations Model, Brishti Guha, Ashok S. Guha

Research Collection School Of Economics

We examine a model in which the utility function has been engineered so that it is optimal for consumers to aim for a fixed target level of retirement resources. In this case, consumption displays excess sensitivity to current income as well as perfect old age insurance. In an overlapping generations model, this leads naturally to multiple and unstable equilibria. Under static expectations, it also leads to a well-defined dynamics, including possible historical traps, implosions involving ever-diminishing capital stock and ever-increasing interest rates, and the feasibility of optimal one-time interventions.


Advertising And Collusion In Retail Markets, Kyle Bagwell, Gea Myoung Lee Mar 2008

Advertising And Collusion In Retail Markets, Kyle Bagwell, Gea Myoung Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

We consider non-price advertising by retail firms that are privately informed as to their respective production costs. We first analyze a static model. We construct an advertising equilibrium, in which informed consumers use an advertising search rule whereby they buy from the highest-advertising firm. Consumers are rational in using the advertising search rule, since the lowest-cost firm advertises the most and also selects the lowest price. Even though the advertising equilibrium facilitates productive efficiency, we establish conditions under which firms enjoy higher expected profit when advertising is banned. Consumer welfare falls in this case, however. We next analyze a dynamic …


Mapping The Discipline Of The Olympic Games An Author-Cocitation Analysis, Peter Warning, Rosie Ching, Kristine Toohey Feb 2008

Mapping The Discipline Of The Olympic Games An Author-Cocitation Analysis, Peter Warning, Rosie Ching, Kristine Toohey

Research Collection School Of Economics

The authors conducted an author cocitation analysis on prominent authors writing about the Olympics during the 1990s. Author cocitation is an established bibliometric technique that can be used to measure the relative similarities of topics written about by the cited authors. This enables a visual representation of the “intellectual space” of the discipline, in this case the Olympics, to be created for the period under review. So core and peripheral research areas are identified, along with their major contributors. The representation appears as a two-dimensional cluster-enhanced map. Subject expertise was then applied to the results to place labels on the …


Target Saving In An Overlapping Generations Model, Ashok S. Guha, Brishti Guha Jan 2008

Target Saving In An Overlapping Generations Model, Ashok S. Guha, Brishti Guha

Research Collection School Of Economics

We examine a model in which the utility function has been engineered so that it is optimal for consumers to aim for a fixed target level of retirement resources. In this case consumption displays excess sensitivity to current income as well as perfect old age insurance. In an overlapping generations model, this leads naturally to multiple and unstable equilibria. Under static expectations, it also leads to a well-defined dynamics, including possible historical traps, implosions involving ever-diminishing capital stock and ever-increasing interest rates, and the feasibility of optimal one-time interventions.


Forecasting The Car Penetration Rate (Cpr) In China: A Nonparametric Approach, Sainan Jin, Liangjun Su Sep 2007

Forecasting The Car Penetration Rate (Cpr) In China: A Nonparametric Approach, Sainan Jin, Liangjun Su

Research Collection School Of Economics

With strong economic growth, the auto industry has made great breakthroughs in recent years and has become a backbone industry in China, while cars play an increasingly important role, and are now the principal part of the auto industry. Both China's government and academic circles take strong interest in the prediction of CPR (i.e. car penetration rate or cars per thousand people), which will be the main guidance for the future industry policy. We summarize the existing problems in recent research and propose to use nonparametric methods to estimate the CPR and its elasticity with respect to GDP per capita …


Dynamic Treatment Effect Analysis Of Tv Effects On Child Cognitive Development, Fali Huang Sep 2007

Dynamic Treatment Effect Analysis Of Tv Effects On Child Cognitive Development, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We investigate whether TV watching at ages 6-7 and 8-9 affects cognitive development measured by math and reading scores at ages 8-9 using a rich childhood longitudinal sample from NLSY79. Dynamic panel data models are estimated to handle the unobserved child-specific factor, endogeneity of TV watching, and dynamic nature of the causal relation. A special emphasis is put on the last aspect where TV watching affects cognitive development which in turn affects the future TV watching. When this feedback occurs, it is not straightforward to identify and estimate the TV effect. We adopt estimation methods available in the biostatistics literature …


On The Segmentation Of Markets, Nicolas Laurent Jacquet, Serene Tan Sep 2007

On The Segmentation Of Markets, Nicolas Laurent Jacquet, Serene Tan

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper endogenizes the market structure of an economy with heterogeneous agents who want to form bilateral matches in the presence of search frictions and when utility is nontransferable. There exist infinitely many marketplaces, and each agent chooses which marketplace to be in: agents get to choose not only whom to match with but also whom they meet with. Perfect segmentation is obtained in equilibrium, where agents match with the first person they meet. All equilibria have the same matching pattern. Although perfect assortative matching is not obtained in equilibrium, the degree of assortativeness is greater than in standard models.


To Trust Or To Monitor: A Dynamic Analysis, Fali Huang Aug 2007

To Trust Or To Monitor: A Dynamic Analysis, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In a principal-agent framework, principals can mitigate moral hazard problems not only through extrinsic incentives such as monitoring, but also through agents’ intrinsic trustworthiness. Their relative usage, however, changes over time and varies across societies. This paper attempts to explain this phenomenon by endogenizing agent trustworthiness as a response to potential returns. When monitoring becomes relatively cheaper over time, agents acquire lower trustworthiness, which may actually drive up the overall governance cost in society. Across societies, those giving employees lower weights in choosing governance methods tend to have higher monitoring intensities and lower trust. These results are consistent with the …


Does Tv Affect Child Cognitive Development?, Fali Huang, Myoung-Jae Lee Aug 2007

Does Tv Affect Child Cognitive Development?, Fali Huang, Myoung-Jae Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

We investigate whether TV watching at ages 6-7 and 8-9 affects cognitive development measured by math and reading scores at ages 8-9 using a rich childhood longitudinal sample from NLSY79. Dynamic panel data models are estimated to handle the unobserved child-specific factor, endogeneity of TV watching, and dynamic nature of the causal relation. A special emphasis is put on the last aspect where TV watching affects cognitive development which in turn affects the future TV watching. When this feedback occurs, it is not straightforward to identify and estimate the TV effect. We adopt estimation methods available in the biostatistics literature …


Open Vs Sealed Bid Auctions: Testing For Revenue Equivalence Under Singapore's Vehicle Quota System, Roberto S. Mariano, Winston T. H. Koh, Yiu Kuen Tse Jan 2007

Open Vs Sealed Bid Auctions: Testing For Revenue Equivalence Under Singapore's Vehicle Quota System, Roberto S. Mariano, Winston T. H. Koh, Yiu Kuen Tse

Research Collection School Of Economics

Using data from the auction of vehicle quota licenses in Singapore, we study if revenue equivalence holds when the auction format was switched from a sealed-bid format (May 1990 to June 2001) to an open bidding format since July 2001. Our econometric analysis indicates the change in auction format led to a change in bidding behavior. On average, the quota license premium under the open bidding format is about US$1000 (about 7.5% of the Category E license price in June 2001) lower, compared to the forecast level that would have prevailed if there had been no change in the auction …


Lottery Rather Than Waiting-Line Auction, Winston T. H. Koh, Zhenlin Yang, Lijing Zhu Oct 2006

Lottery Rather Than Waiting-Line Auction, Winston T. H. Koh, Zhenlin Yang, Lijing Zhu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper investigates the allocative efficiency of two non-price allocation mechanisms – the lottery (random allocation) and the waiting-line auction (queue system) – for the cases where consumers possess identical time costs (the homogeneous case), and where time costs are correlated with time valuations (the heterogeneous case). We show that the relative efficiency of the two mechanisms depends critically on a scarcity factor (measured by the ratio of the number of objects available for allocation over the number of participants) and on the shape of the distribution of valuations. We show that the lottery dominates the waiting-line auction for a …


What Matter For Child Development?, Fali Huang Oct 2006

What Matter For Child Development?, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper estimates production functions of child cognitive and social development using a panel data of nine-year old children each with over two hundred home and school inputs as well as family background variables. A tree regression method is used to conduct estimation under various speci…cations. A small subset of inputs is found consistently important in explaining variances of child development results, including the number of books a child has at various ages and how often a mother reads to child by age …ve, while the e¤ects of race and maternal employment are negligible when detailed inputs are controlled.


Expectations, Animal Spirits, And Evolutionary Dynamics, Angelo Antoci, Massimiliano Landi, Pier Luigi Sacco Mar 2006

Expectations, Animal Spirits, And Evolutionary Dynamics, Angelo Antoci, Massimiliano Landi, Pier Luigi Sacco

Research Collection School Of Economics

We consider a (deterministic) evolutionary model where players have dynamic expectations about the strategy distribution. We provide a global analysis of the co-evolution of play and expectations for a generic two-by-two game. Besides the the typical indeterminacy of the evolutionary dynamics, we find some other ones: for any initial strategy configuration the dynamics can converge to any asymptotically stable fixed point, for different initial values of the expectations. Moreover, starting from the same initial pair of strategy configuration and values of expectations, the dynamics may lead to different asymptotically stable fixed points for different parameters of the expectations.


Strategy Meets Evolution: Games Suppliers And Producers Play, Brishti Guha Feb 2006

Strategy Meets Evolution: Games Suppliers And Producers Play, Brishti Guha

Research Collection School Of Economics

Final goods producers, who may be intrinsically honest (a behavioral type) or opportunistic (strategic), play a repeated game of imperfect information with suppliers of an input of variable (and non-verifiable) quality. Returns to cheating are increasing in the proportion of intrinsically honest producers. If producers compete for another scarce input, adverse selection reduces this proportion enough to enforce universal honesty, whether at a high or a low quality equilibrium. This mechanism limits the proportion of behavioral types in the population of producers over a wide range of parameters: despite their inability to compete with opportunists, they are not wholly wiped …


Homeostasis And Well Being, Malcolm Dowling, Chin Fang Yap Feb 2006

Homeostasis And Well Being, Malcolm Dowling, Chin Fang Yap

Research Collection School Of Economics

The paper suggests that maintenance of a homeostatic equilibrium provides a rationale for many actions of economic agents. Homeostatic equilibrium has physical, economic, emotional, psychological and environmental dimensions. The characteristics of this equilibrium include feelings of safety, trust, connectedness with friends, family and community, and a predictable and welcoming social and work environment. Individuals generally make decisions that help them move toward and achieve this state of equilibrium. Departure from homeostasis reduces well being and stimulates agents to take actions that will return them to a state of homeostasis. This hypothesis is tested with probit analysis using sample responses from …