Behavioral Economics Commons^™

Opposing The Lottery In The U.S.: The Forces Behind Individual Attitudes Towards Legalization In 1975, Andrew J. Economopoulos

Business and Economics Faculty Publications

In the 1970s, opposition to the lottery started to fracture in the US. This study examines causes of the fracture and historical factors that contributed to changes in individual attitudes towards legalization. The opponents at the time held to traditional arguments against legalized lotteries—negative economic effects, costs to others and increased crime. Unlike in the past, however, there was weak religious institutional opposition to lotteries. Individuals with a strong commitment to their religious affiliation were more resistant to pro-lottery arguments, but in most cases could be convinced to support the lottery. The pre-World War II generation remained steadfast against the …

Software And Internet Industry Workers: Implications For The Future Of Work In Massachusetts, Sarah Kuhn, Paula Raymann

New England Journal of Public Policy

Those at the leading edge of the new economy — workers in software and Internet workplaces — can tell us something about the future of work in our new world. The authors have conducted a National Science Foundation-funded study of women and men working in IT. They find that while pay and the opportunity to do interesting work are major attractions, challenges facing this workforce include stress, difficulties balancing work and family, and concerns about employment security. While women and men reported similar attitudes and experiences in many areas, in others there were still significant differences.

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

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.

A Pro-Poor Framework For Enhancing Micro-Savings In Nigeria., M. C. Ononugbo, C. P. Nwosu

Bullion

Nigerians generally do not seem to have what is usually referred to as “the saving culture”. This assertion may not entirely be true as it based on information from the formal banking system without recourse to the savings activities at the informal sector of the economy. It is a fact that the informal sector of the economy is large with unrecorded transactions. Consequently, this paper attempts to examine the fundamental issues in saving and thereafter design a formal savings habit of the populace, especially the low-income group. The framework is designed to mobilise micro-savings, hitherto kept with thrift collectors and …

College Students And Gambling: Gauging The Effects Of Gender On Impulse Control, Sensation Seeking, And Mental Health As Predictors Of Involvement, Terry D. Burger

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The main purpose of the current study was to enhance the global understanding of adolescent Internet gambling involvement by examining rates of participation and the influence of impulse control, sensation seeking, and mental health problems as predictors of involvement. In addition to a demographic survey to gather information including year in school, age, gender, mode of gambling participation (online vs. traditional venues), age gambling participation began (for both non-Internet and Internet modes), disposable income, and hours spent online each week, the current research study questionnaire was comprised of a three standardized instruments: {a) the South Oaks Gambling Screen (SOGS); (b) …

Assessing The Economic Impact Of The Fayetteville, Arkansas Smoking Ban, Jeffery T. Collins

Publications and Presentations

This report is the third in a series of studies examining the impact of the implementation of the smoke-free ordinance in Fayetteville, Arkansas in March of 2004. The ban on smoking in public places in Fayetteville provides an opportunity to scientifically investigate the economic impact of this change in public policy. By comparing pre-ban historical economic growth rates to post-ban growth rates both within the city of Fayetteville and in comparable communities, some measure of the impact can be developed. Variables of interest include hotel, motel, and restaurant (HMR) taxes, employment, and sales taxes. The changes in these variables need …

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

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

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 …

The Effects Of Sexual Orientation On Earnings, Tsz-Ying Yeung

Gettysburg Economic Review

Gay and lesbian topics have received much media attention in recent years. Debates have revolved around issues such as gay marriage, adoption rights, and the legal relationship of children born to a homosexual couple with their nonbiological second parent. Corporations have started to provide partner benefits to gay and lesbian employees. Many companies today have added the words “sexual orientation” to their equal rights hiring policies. Nevertheless, discrimination against homosexual people in the workplace is still widely perceived to exist.

In this paper, I address the question, does earnings discrimination against homosexual and bisexual workers exist in the U.S. labor …

Efficiency Of The Mutual Fund Industry: An Examination Of U.S. Domestic Equity Funds: 1995-2004, Chase J. Stewart

Gettysburg Economic Review

Investors have the ability to choose between two different management styles in the mutual fund industry. These two management styles differ in both the investment strategy type the fund executes and management costs, which are charged to the funds’ investors. First, investors may invest their funds in index funds, which employ a passive investment strategy. Here, investors expect to earn a rate of return equivalent to the market index—minus a small management fee—which the fund seeks to track. Alternatively, investors may choose active fund management. The returns of these mutual funds rely on stock selection ability of portfolio managers. Active …

The Gettysburg Economic Review, Volume 1, Spring 2006

Gettysburg Economic Review

No abstract provided.

Assessing The Economic Impact Of The 6th Annual Bikes, Blues, And Bbq Festival On The City Of Fayetteville, Jeffery T. Collins

Publications and Presentations

This report presents the results of the surveys used to develop estimates of the economic impact of the Bikes, Blues and BBQ (BBBBQ) festival on the city of Fayetteville in 2005. In order to fully estimate the economic impact of the festival, its influence was assessed on three different constituent groups: Fayetteville residents, local businesses, and BBBBQ visitors.

The visitor survey was developed by the Center for Business and Economic Research and was administered September 28-October 1, 2005 by University of Arkansas students who were hired and trained by the Center for Business and Economic Research. The resident and local …

It’S Not About The Money: The Role Of Preferences, Cognitive Biases And Heuristics Among Professional Athletes, Michael Mccann

Law Faculty Scholarship

Professional athletes are often regarded as selfish, greedy, and out-of-touch with regular people. They hire agents who are vilified for negotiating employment contracts that occasionally yield compensation in excess of national gross domestic products. Professional athletes are thus commonly assumed to most value economic remuneration, rather than the love of the game or some other intangible, romanticized inclination.

Lending credibility to this intuition is the rational actor model, a law and economic precept which presupposes that when individuals are presented with a set of choices, they rationally weigh costs and benefits, and select the course of action that maximizes their …

Does Falling Smoking Lead To Rising Obesity?, Jonathan Gruber, Michael D. Frakes

Faculty Scholarship

The strong negative correlation over time between smoking rates and obesity have led some to suggest that reduced smoking is increasing weight gain in the U.S.. This conclusion is supported by the findings of Chou et al. (2004), who conclude that higher cigarette prices lead to increased body weight. We investigate this issue and find no evidence that reduced smoking leads to weight gain. Using the cigarette tax rather than the cigarette price and controlling for non-linear time effects, we find a negative effect of cigarette taxes on body weight, implying that reduced smoking leads to lower body weights. Yet …

The Promise (And Limits) Of Neuroeconomics, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Neuroeconomics — the study of brain activity in people engaged in tasks of reasoning and choice — looks set to be the next behavioral economics: a set of findings about how people make decisions that casts both light and doubt on widely accepted premises about rationality and social life. This Article explains what is most exciting about the new field and lays out some specific research tasks for it.

Tap And Reposition Youth (Try): Providing Social Support, Savings, And Microcredit Opportunities For Young Women In Areas With High Hiv Prevalence, Annabel Erulkar, Judith Bruce, Aleke Dondo, Jennefer Sebstad, James K. Matheka, Arjmand Banu Khan, Anne Gathuku

Poverty, Gender, and Youth

Tap and Reposition Youth (TRY) was a multiphase initiative undertaken by the Population Council and K-Rep Development Agency (KDA), the oldest and largest microfinance institution in Kenya. The overall aim of the project was to reduce adolescents’ vulnerabilities to adverse social and reproductive health outcomes, including HIV infection, by improving their livelihoods options. The project was launched in low-income and slum areas of Nairobi, Kenya, where rates of HIV infection are alarming and where young women are disproportionately affected.