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Full-Text Articles in Behavioral Economics

Are You Ready For Some Football? Estimating The Effect Of American Football Season On Labor Supply In The United States, Luke Petach, Dustin Rumbaugh Jan 2021

Are You Ready For Some Football? Estimating The Effect Of American Football Season On Labor Supply In The United States, Luke Petach, Dustin Rumbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

American football season reduces the Monday labor hours of employed men by two-thirds of an hour. A similar effect is found for Friday labor hours. We term these effects the “hangover effect” and “happy hour effect.” Consistent with a wide class of labor market models, the labor supply effect varies over the business cycle, increasing in expansions. The hangover effect implies an intertemporal elasticity of labor supply on the order of 0.014. Evaluated at the median hourly wage, our estimates imply an annual economic cost of foregone earnings associated with football season in the neighborhood of $5.06 billion.


Causes And Consequences Of Risk Aversion In Middle Adulthood, Nataliya Rubinchik May 2016

Causes And Consequences Of Risk Aversion In Middle Adulthood, Nataliya Rubinchik

Theses and Dissertations

I analyze how risk aversion may affect decision-making over time, what effects risk aversion may have on decisions, and whether one’s level of risk aversion varies over time. I find that risk preferences correlate with certain maternal factors, income, depression, and ethnicity. Risk aversion correlates with financial and health decisions.


Nashbots: How Political Scientists Have Underestimated Human Rationality, And How To Fix It, Daniel Enemark, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner Jan 2016

Nashbots: How Political Scientists Have Underestimated Human Rationality, And How To Fix It, Daniel Enemark, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner

Faculty Scholarship

Political scientists use experiments to test the predictions of game-theoretic models. In a typical experiment, each subject makes choices that determine her own earnings and the earnings of other subjects, with payments corresponding to the utility payoffs of a theoretical game. But social preferences distort the correspondence between a subject’s cash earnings and her subjective utility, and since social preferences vary, anonymously matched subjects cannot know their opponents’ preferences between outcomes, turning many laboratory tasks into games of incomplete information. We reduce the distortion of social preferences by pitting subjects against algorithmic agents (“Nashbots”). Across 11 experimental tasks, subjects facing …


Aggregating Moral Preferences, Matthew D. Adler Jan 2016

Aggregating Moral Preferences, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

Preference-aggregation problems arise in various contexts. One such context, little explored by social choice theorists, is metaethical. “Ideal-advisor” accounts, which have played a major role in metaethics, propose that moral facts are constituted by the idealized preferences of a community of advisors. Such accounts give rise to a preference-aggregation problem: namely, aggregating the advisors’ moral preferences. Do we have reason to believe that the advisors, albeit idealized, can still diverge in their rankings of a given set of alternatives? If so, what are the moral facts (in particular, the comparative moral goodness of the alternatives) when the advisors do diverge? …


Against Game Theory, Gale M. Lucas, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner Jan 2015

Against Game Theory, Gale M. Lucas, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner

Faculty Scholarship

People make choices. Often, the outcome depends on choices other people make. What mental steps do people go through when making such choices? Game theory, the most influential model of choice in economics and the social sciences, offers an answer, one based on games of strategy such as chess and checkers: the chooser considers the choices that others will make and makes a choice that will lead to a better outcome for the chooser, given all those choices by other people. It is universally established in the social sciences that classical game theory (even when heavily modified) is bad at …


Risk Preferences And Prenatal Exposure To Sex Hormones For Ladinos, Diego Aycinena, Rimvydas Baltaduonis, Lucas Rentschler Aug 2014

Risk Preferences And Prenatal Exposure To Sex Hormones For Ladinos, Diego Aycinena, Rimvydas Baltaduonis, Lucas Rentschler

Economics Faculty Publications

Risk preferences drive much of human decision making including investment, career and health choices and many more. Thus, understanding the determinants of risk preferences refines our understanding of choice in a broad array of environments. We assess the relationship between risk preferences, prenatal exposure to sex hormones and gender for a sample of Ladinos, which is an ethnic group comprising 62.86% of the population of Guatemala. Prenatal exposure to sex hormones has organizational effects on brain development, and has been shown to partially explain risk preferences for Caucasians. We measure prenatal exposure to sex hormones using the ratio of the …


Are Individuals Fickle-Minded?, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner Jan 2014

Are Individuals Fickle-Minded?, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner

Faculty Scholarship

Game theory has been used to model large-scale social events — such as constitutional law, democratic stability, standard setting, gender roles, social movements, communication, markets, the selection of officials by means of elections, coalition formation, resource allocation, distribution of goods, and war — as the aggregate result of individual choices in interdependent decision-making. Game theory in this way assumes methodological individualism. The widespread observation that game theory predictions do not in general match observation has led to many attempts to repair game theory by creating behavioral game theory, which adds corrective terms to the game theoretic predictions in the hope …


Extended Preferences And Interpersonal Comparisons: A New Account, Matthew D. Adler Jan 2014

Extended Preferences And Interpersonal Comparisons: A New Account, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


New Operations Over Interval Valued Intuitionistic Hesitant Fuzzy Set, Florentin Smarandache, Said Broumi Jan 2014

New Operations Over Interval Valued Intuitionistic Hesitant Fuzzy Set, Florentin Smarandache, Said Broumi

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

Hesitancy is the most common problem in decision making, for which hesitant fuzzy set can be considered as a useful tool allowing several possible degrees of membership of an element to a set. Recently, another suitable means were defined by Zhiming Zhang [1], called interval valued intuitionistic hesitant fuzzy sets, dealing with uncertainty and vagueness, and which is more powerful than the hesitant fuzzy sets. In this paper, four new operations are introduced on interval-valued intuitionistic hesitant fuzzy sets and several important properties are also studied.


Can We Build Behavioral Game Theory?, Gale M. Lucas, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner Jan 2013

Can We Build Behavioral Game Theory?, Gale M. Lucas, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner

Faculty Scholarship

The way economists and other social scientists model how people make interdependent decisions is through the theory of games. Psychologists and behavioral economists, however, have established many deviations from the predictions of game theory. In response to these findings, a broad movement has arisen to salvage the core of game theory. Extant models of interdependent decision-making try to improve their explanatory domain by adding some corrective terms or limits. We will make the argument that this approach is misguided. For this approach to work, the deviations would have to be consistent. Drawing in part on our experimental results, we will …


Dynamic Decision Making And Race Games, Shipra De Apr 2011

Dynamic Decision Making And Race Games, Shipra De

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

Frequent criticism in dynamic decision making research pertains to the overly complex nature of the decision tasks used in experimentation. To address such concerns we study dynamic decision making with respect to the simple race game Hog, which has a computable optimal decision strategy. In the two-player game of Hog, individuals compete to be the first to reach a designated threshold of points. Players alternate rolling a desired quantity of dice. If the number one appears on any of the dice, the player receives no points for his turn; otherwise, the sum of the numbers appearing on the dice is …


Put Your Money Where Your Butt Is: A Commitment Contract For Smoking Cessation, Xavier Giné, Dean Karlan, Jonathan Zinman Oct 2010

Put Your Money Where Your Butt Is: A Commitment Contract For Smoking Cessation, Xavier Giné, Dean Karlan, Jonathan Zinman

Dartmouth Scholarship

We designed and tested a voluntary commitment product to help smokers quit smoking. The product (CARES) offered smokers a savings account in which they deposit funds for six months, after which they take a urine test for nicotine and cotinine. If they pass, their money is returned; otherwise, their money is forfeited to charity. Of smokers offered CARES, 11 percent took up, and smokers randomly offered CARES were 3 percentage points more likely to pass the 6-month test than the control group. More importantly, this effect persisted in surprise tests at 12 months, indicating that CARES produced lasting smoking cessation. …


Profit Maximization Versus Disadvantageous Inequality: The Impact Of Self-Categorization, Stephen M. Garcia, Avishalom Tor, Max H. Bazerman, Dale T. Miller Jan 2005

Profit Maximization Versus Disadvantageous Inequality: The Impact Of Self-Categorization, Stephen M. Garcia, Avishalom Tor, Max H. Bazerman, Dale T. Miller

Journal Articles

Choice behavior researchers (e.g., Bazerman, Loewenstein, & White, 1992) have found that individuals tend to choose a more lucrative but disadvantageously unequal payoff (e.g., self—$600/other—$800) over a less profitable but equal one (e.g., self—$500/other—$500); greater profit trumps interpersonal social comparison concerns in the choice setting. We suggest, however, that self-categorization (e.g., Hogg, 2000) can shift interpersonal social comparison concerns to the intergroup level and make trading disadvantageous inequality for greater profit more difficult. Studies 1–3 show that profit maximization diminishes when recipients belong to different social categories (e.g., genders, universities). Study 2 further implicates self-categorization, as selfcategorized individuals tend to …


Czech Voucher Privatization: A Case Of Decision Making Under Uncertainty, Katia Hristova Jan 2002

Czech Voucher Privatization: A Case Of Decision Making Under Uncertainty, Katia Hristova

University Avenue Undergraduate Journal of Economics

In my study, I plan to analyze voucher privatization in the Czech Republic. This process is best characterized as decision making under both risk and uncertainty, where the thousands of individuals who initially received vouchers were operating under near total uncertainty while larger institutional investors who later seized control of the vouchers were operating under conditions of risk. I will analyze the resulting patterns of ownership in comparison to the goals of the process. I will also discuss the role of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank as institutions which affect the conditions under which voucher privatization was conducted. …