Economic Theory Commons^™

Taking Employment Seriously: With Some Notes On Universal Basic Income, Larry Udell

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The question of whether to grant all citizens a basic income that would starts with adulthood is the source of much controversy today among people who believe that government should do something to address income inequality (including but not limited to addressing increasingly widespread poverty and homelessness). Philippe Van Parijs famously advocated such a policy, but his proposal was rejected by John Rawls, who demurred at subsidizing Malibu surfers with public support for their leisure and instead emphasized the need for a full employment policy. I argue that a slight modification of Rawls's theory might allow for a limited UBI …

Did Covid-19 Disrupt The Stock Market Return And Volatility? A Meta-Analytic Approach, Masagus M. Ridhwan, Solikin M. Juhro, Affandi Ismail, Peter Nijkamp, Kelvin Ramadhan Hidayat

Bulletin of Monetary Economics and Banking

We provide a quantitative synthesis of the literature utilizing meta-regression analysis on the measurable effect of the combined health and economic crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic on stock market returns and volatility. This study is conducted based on 104 studies published during the period 2020 to 2022. We find strong evidence of a negative publication bias for COVID-19 impacts on stock market returns and a positive bias on volatility. We document that COVID-19 has a moderate negative effect on stock market returns. Estimates based on intraday stock returns show a greater effect compared to those using daily returns, whereas …

Truth By Consensus: A Theoretical And Empirical Investigation, Gabriele Camera, Rod Garratt, Cyril Monnet

ESI Working Papers

Truthful reporting about publicly observed events cannot be guaranteed by a consensus process. This fact, which we establish theoretically and verify empirically, holds true even if some individuals are compelled to tell the truth, regardless of economic incentives. In an experiment, subjects routinely misreported a commonly known event when they could monetarily gain from it. Relying on majority consensus did not help uncover the truth, especially if complying with the majority granted small personal monetary gains. This highlights the difficulties in relying on shared consensus protocols to agree on specific events, and the importance of institutions with trusted, impartial observers.

Trade Liberalization With Brics: A Cge Model Of Egypt, Kareem Ashraf

Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents an ex-ante impact assessment of a hypothetical FTA between Egypt and the BRICS from an Egyptian economy-wide and sectorial perspectives, with a granular look into manufacturing. The chosen methodology is a static SAM-based Computable General Equilibrium model calibrated to Egypt’s 2018-2019 Social Accounting Matrix (SAM). With respect to existing literature, the paper uniquely stands in considering an Egypt-BRICS FTA with a granular assessment of manufacturing subsectors and in running a simulation of Egypt’s trade liberalization with the wider BRICS alliance, including the accession of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Ethiopia, and Iran, which joined the bloc along with Egypt …

Cross-Cousin Marriage Among Tsimane Forager–Horticulturalists During Demographic Transition And Market Integration, Arianna Dalzero, Bret A. Beheim, Hillard Kaplan, Jonathan Stieglitz, Paul L. Hooper, Cody T. Ross, Michael D. Gurven, Dieter Lukas

ESI Publications

Although still prevalent in many human societies, the practice of cousin marriage has precipitously declined in populations undergoing rapid demographic and socioeconomic change. However, it is still unclear whether changes in the structure of the marriage pool or changes in the fitness-relevant consequences of cousin marriage more strongly influence the frequency of cousin marriage. Here, we use genealogical data collected by the Tsimane Health and Life History Project to show that there is a small but measurable decline in the frequency of first cross-cousin marriage since the mid-twentieth century. Such changes are linked to concomitant changes in the pool of …

Good Times, Politics, And Collapse: The Archaeology Of Old St. Joseph, Florida, Christopher N. Hunt

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The town of St. Joseph, established in 1835, served as a deep-water port for receiving and shipping dry goods up the Apalachicola River north along the vast network of navigable inland waterways in the southeastern U.S. during the early nineteenth century. Unfortunately, this town was hit with a yellow fever epidemic, a fire, and a series of hurricanes that, combined with the infancy of its cotton trade activities, eventually devastated its economy and population. The town disappeared by 1842, only much later to be replaced by modern Port St. Joe (est. 1909), located north of the original settlement. However, St. …

Who Do You Think Is The Greatest-Ever Economist?, Mark Skousen

Business Faculty Articles and Research

"Deciding who is the Greatest of All Time (GOAT) is a popular debate in sports. Is it Michael Jordan in basketball? Lionel Messi in fútbol? Muhammed Ali in boxing? Babe Ruth in baseball? (In case you are wondering, the answer is 'yes' in each category.)

Tyler Cowen, professor at George Mason University and co-publisher of the popular Marginal Revolution website, has come up with one of the most clever, entertaining ways to write a history of economic thought by selecting his favorite GOAT in economics."

Ambiguity, Cognitive Reflection, And Strategic Complexity Across Auctions, Cary Deck, Paan Jindapon, Tigran Melkonyan, Mark Schneider

ESI Working Papers

This paper bridges large but separate literatures on decision-making under ambiguity, the dual system framework of behavioral economics, and market design. We characterize behavior under ambiguity arising from dual system preferences. Rational System 2 satisfies the subjective expected utility axioms while behavioral System 1 satisfies the obvious dominance axiom from mechanism design. Our axioms provide a novel foundation for the popular NEO-EU ambiguity model and allow for source dependent ambiguity perceptions. Our approach also provides an explanation as to how behavioral differences arise between obviously strategy-proof mechanisms (e.g. English auctions) and other mechanisms. Empirically, we find ambiguity perceptions are lower …

Interim Regret Minimization, Wei He, Jiangtao Li, Kexin Wang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We consider a robust version of monopoly pricing when the seller only knows the bound on valuations and the mean of the distribution of the buyer’s value. The seller seeks to minimize interim regret, the forgone expected revenue due to not knowing the distribution of the buyer’s value. The optimal pricing policy randomizes over a range of prices; the support of the pricing policy is bounded away from zero.

Obfuscation And Rational Inattention, Aljoscha Janssen, Johannes Kasinger

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study the behavior of duopolistic firms that can obfuscate their prices before competing on price. Obfuscation affects the rational inattentive consumers' optimal information strategy, which determines the probabilistic demand. Our model advances related models by allowing consumers to update their unrestricted prior beliefs with an informative signal of any form. We show that the game may result in an obfuscation equilibrium with high prices or a transparency equilibrium with low prices and no obfuscation, providing an argument for market regulation. Obfuscation equilibria cease to exist for low information costs and if one firm seems a priori considerably more attractive.

The Interplay Of Interdependence And Correlation In Bilateral Trade, Takashi Kunimoto, Cuiling Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Crémer and McLean (1988) show that the seller can extract full surplus almost always by an incentive compatible, individually rational mechanism in a single-unit auction model with a finite type space in which agents' beliefs are correlated and their valuations can be interdependent. We first show that this paradoxically positive result can be extended to a model of bilateral trades. To make it more realistic, we investigate when ex-post efficiency and ex-post budget balance in bilateral trades can also be achieved by an incentive compatible, individually rational mechanism. We identify a necessary condition for the existence of such mechanisms and …

Cognitive Abilities And Individual Earnings In Hybrid Continuous Double Auctions, Yan Peng, Jason Shachat, Lijia Wei, S. Sarah Zhang

ESI Working Papers

There is growing evidence that human cognitive abilities strongly influence individual trader financial performance. Much of this evidence has been established in experimental asset markets whose participants are exclusively human traders. However, algorithmic trading has reshaped financial markets, raising the issue of whether these assessments on the impact of cognititive abilities still hold in these settings, particularly in markets with low latency algorithmic traders. Extending previous findings in experimental asset markets, we examine how individual cognitive abilities—reaction time, trader intuition (Theory of Mind), and cognitive reflection—affect human earnings in induced demand and supply markets with and without algorithmic traders of …

Interviews In Global Catholic Studies: Matthew Eggemeier And Peter Fritz, Mathew N. Schmalz, Matthew Eggemeier, Peter Joseph Fritz

Journal of Global Catholicism

No abstract provided.

Coordinated And Uncoordinated Punishment In A Team Investment Game, Vicente Calabuig, Natalia Jiménez-Jiménez, Gonzalo Olcina, Ismael Rodriguez-Lara

ESI Publications

Coordinated punishment occurs when punishment requires a specific number of punishers to be effective, otherwise, no damage will be inflicted on the target. While societies often rely on this punishment device, its benefits are unclear compared to uncoordinated punishment, where punishment decisions are substitutes. In this paper, we compare the efficacy of coordinated and uncoordinated punishment in a team investment game with two investors and one allocator. Our findings indicate that coordinated punishment results in higher levels of cooperation and reciprocity, as measured by the levels of joint investment and the return by allocators. Importantly, this does not translate into …

Possible Role Of The One-Half Heuristic In Overconfidence Research, Vojtěch Zíka

ESI Working Papers

Overconfidence research often involves estimating performance within a fixed range. Recent studies suggest that overprecision is affected by central tendency bias, the tendency to estimate near the center of a perceived distribution. This paper examines whether a similar pattern influences the other two overconfidence types, overestimation and overplacement. In a laboratory experiment (N = 120), participants estimated their own and the average performance over five rounds of ten Rock–Paper–Scissors games. Each round earned for up to 40 points, but average performance varied across three treatments, with means of 16.6, 20, and 23.3 points. The main question was whether this manipulation …

How Does Passive Investing Effect The Informational Efficiency Of Prices?, Brice Corgnet, Mark Desantis, Yan Peng, David Porter, Jason Shachat

ESI Working Papers

We investigate the causal effects of passive investing on informational efficiency and market quality metrics by developing a novel laboratory experiment that introduces Index trackers with exogenous passive investment flows. We find that, while improving liquidity, Index tracking hurts informational efficiency, confirming our main hypothesis. Furthermore, we observe violations of the law of one price, leading to widespread and persistent arbitrage opportunities. Additionally, our research uncovers that Active traders, particularly those with private information about asset values and high cognitive ability, reap benefits from the introduction of Index tracking.

Sleep Restriction Alters The Integration Of Multiple Information Sources In Probabilistic Decision-Making, Jeryl Y. L. Lim, Johanna M. Boardman, Clare Anderson, David L. Dickinson, Daniel Bennett, Sean P. A. Drummond

ESI Publications

The detrimental effects of sleep loss on overall decision-making have been well described. Due to the complex nature of decisions, there remains a need for studies to identify specific mechanisms of decision-making vulnerable to sleep loss. Bayesian perspectives of decision-making posit judgement formation during decision-making occurs via a process of integrating knowledge gleaned from past experiences (priors) with new information from current observations (likelihoods). We investigated the effects of sleep loss on the ability to integrate multiple sources of information during decision-making by reporting results from two experiments: the first implementing both sleep restriction (SR) and …

Representation And Bracketing In Repeated Games, Mouli Modak

ESI Working Papers

In this experimental paper, the author investigates the framing effect of different representations of multiple strategic settings or games on a player’s strategic behavior. Two representations of the same environment are employed, wherein a player engages in two infinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma games. In the first representation (termed Split), the stage games are shown separately. In contrast, the second representation (termed Linked) displays a combined stage game. The choice bracketing, distinguishing between Narrow and Broad bracketing, is considered a potential cause behind any disparity in behavior between the two representations. The Split representation does not necessitate broad bracketing, whereas the …

Richard Iii, The Tudor Myth, And The Transition From Feudalism To Capitalism, Thomas E. Lambert

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Over the last 10 years or so there has been a resurgence of interest in the English king Richard III, especially after his remains are found in 2012 after being lost or missing for centuries. Prior to this, there are many publications, reports, and documentaries alluding to a “smear” campaign being conducted against the king by either the Tudor monarchs who succeeded him and/or by their confederates and surrogates. It is alleged that this is done in order to promote and make the Tudor dynasty of the 16^th Century (Henry VII, Henry VIII, Mary I, and Elizabeth I) appear …

Poor Oral Health Is Associated With Inflammation, Aortic Valve Calcification, And Brain Volume Among Forager-Farmers, Benjamin C. Trumble, Matthew Schwartz, Andrew T. Ozga, Gary T. Schwartz, Christopher M. Stojanowski, Carrie L. Jenkins, Thomas Kraft, Angela R. Garcia, Daniel K. Cummings, Paul L. Hooper, Daniel Eid Rodriguez, Kenneth Buetow, Bret Beheim, Andrei Irimia, Gregory S. Thomas, Randall C. Thompson, Horus Team, Margaret Gatz, Jonathan Stieglitz, Caleb E. Finch, Michael Gurven, Hillard Kaplan

ESI Publications

Poor oral health is associated with cardiovascular disease and dementia. Potential pathways include sepsis from oral bacteria, systemic inflammation, and nutritional deficiencies. However, in post-industrialized populations, links between oral health and chronic disease may be confounded because the lower socioeconomic exposome (poor diet, pollution, low physical activity) often entails insufficient dental care. We assessed tooth loss, caries, and damaged teeth, in relation to cardiovascular and brain aging among the Tsimane, a subsistence population living a relatively traditional forager-horticulturalist lifestyle with poor dental health, but minimal cardiovascular disease and dementia. Dental health was assessed by a physician in 739 participants aged …

Pengaruh Talent Management Dan Servant Leadership Terhadap Kinerja Asn Kantor Pusat Bpk Ri, Nurwinten Panggabean

Jurnal Administrasi Bisnis Terapan

This study aims to determine and analyze the influence of talent management and servant leadership on ASN performance both partially and collectively. The research method used is descriptive and verification. The research was conducted at 95 ASNs at the BPK RI Head Office. Sampling was carried out using simple random sampling technique. The data analysis technique used is multiple regression analysis. The findings of this study are that partially or jointly talent management and servant leadership affect ASN performance. Furthermore, a determinant value is obtained worth 0.956, this gives the meaning that talent management and servant leadership are able to …

How Personalized Networks Can Limit Free Riding: A Multi-Group Version Of The Public Goods Game, Aaron S. Berman, Laurence R. Iannaccone, Mouli Modak

ESI Working Papers

People belong to many different groups, and few belong to the same network of groups. Moreover, people routinely reduce their involvement in dysfunctional groups while increasing involvement in those they find more attractive. The net effect can be an increase in overall cooperation and the partial isolation of free-riders, even if free-riders are never punished, excluded, or recognized. We formalize and test this conjecture with an agent-based social simulation and a multi-good extension of the standard repeated public goods game. Our initial results from three treatments suggest that the multi-group setting indeed raises overall cooperation and dampens the impact of …

The Fallacy Of Composition, Its Wide-Ranging Applications In Economics/Business And Why Systems Science Is Appropriate For Economic And Business Research, Jeffrey Yi-Lin Forrest, Joachim Wagner, Jennifer Nightingale, Huan Guo, Jennifer Roy

Pennsylvania Economic Review

This paper explores how widely the erroneous logic of reasoning of the fallacy of composition has been employed in many areas of knowledge, especially in economic and business studies. It then shows why systems science and methodology are truly appropriate for investigating organizations, evolutions and interactions of business entities by focusing on emergent macro-level properties that are not explainable by the characteristics of micro-level individuals. To demonstrate the potentially magnificent consequence of this proposal, a theorem of general systems is displayed to confirm how unintended and uncoordinated micro-level individual desires can naturally lead to macro-level phenomena, such as racial segregation …

Personal Lies, Gary Charness, Ismael Rodriguez-Lara

ESI Working Papers

Using the mind game, we provide experimental evidence that people are more likely to lie when they disclose non-personal information (e.g., reporting a number they thought of) compared with personal information (e.g., reporting the last digit of their birth year). Our findings suggest that the type of information is an important factor for lying behavior.

Experimental Research On Contests, Subhashish M. Chowdhury, Dan Kovenock, Anwesha Mukherjee

ESI Working Papers

Contests are situations in which agents compete by irreversibly expending costly resources in an attempt to win a prize. Due to their applications in conflict, rent-seeking, organizational incentives, sports, litigation, and political campaigns, contests are widely applied in the social sciences. In this survey we summarize some main results and recent developments of experimental studies in contest theory. We also point out their broader applications in the social sciences.

Poverty And Inequality: A New Deal For America’S Most Disadvantaged Communities, Thomas St. Hilaire

Theses and Dissertations

The United States, often hailed as the most affluent nation globally, paradoxically grapples with rates of poverty, disadvantage, and inequality that surpass those of its advanced democratic counterparts. The persistence of poverty and inequality in the United States have often been justified by beliefs of welfare dependency, “free market” thinking and utilitarianism. This master's thesis explores the far-reaching moral, political, and economic consequences of America’s high rates of poverty and inequality. It contends that federal action is urgently needed on more robust social programs that target poverty, such as affordable housing, accessible healthcare, greater worker protections, and deepened social capital …

Capitalism, Democracy, And Adam Smith, John Thrasher

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

How can we better understand the relationship between capitalism and democracy today? This article challenges the prevailing “independence thesis” that views capitalism and democracy as separate and often antagonistic systems. By revisiting Adam Smith’s integrationist approach to political economy, I argue for a more nuanced understanding of the symbiotic relationship between political and economic orders. The article critically examines common responses to the independence thesis – insulation and implementation strategies – and proposes an alternative framework based on Smith’s integrated political economy. This Smithian perspective not only offers a more accurate description of the interdependence between capitalism and democracy but …

Effects Of The Homegrown Player Rule In The English Premier League: A Comprehensive Analysis Of Squad Composition, Market Values, And Wages, Jiho "Brian" Jun

Pitzer Senior Theses

This paper uses theoretical frameworks from economics and sports management to investigate the transformative effects of the Homegrown Player Rule on English Premier League squad dynamics, market valuations, and wage structures. The study examines the evolution of homegrown player distribution across clubs from the rule’s implementation in 2010 to the most recent season in 2023. My analysis of market values and wages finds no evidence that the rule leads to possible market value and wage rate disparities between homegrown and non-homegrown players. Subsequent research shows evidence of a decrease in the real wage rate of homegrown players over time, contrasting …

Circular Economy: The 4rs Reduce-Reuse-Recycle-Recover, Kevin Hom

Publications and Research

This article summarizes the lecture presented at the Net Built 2024 conference. The lecture addresses the unsustainability of the current linear economy, characterized by the "take, make, dispose" model, in light of environmental challenges. The inefficiencies of this system lead to increased energy consumption, elevated CO2 emissions, and the exacerbation of climate change. It examines the current state of design and construction with respect to climate change and sustainable resource management. Additionally, the lecture introduces a methodology that integrates technologies and design philosophies capable of driving significant positive change. By advocating for a transformative approach to the expected lifetime of …

Empirical Linkage Between Economic Growth And Political Instability And The Effects Of Inequalities In Africa, Francis Joseph Assenga

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The examination of the relationship between political instability and economic growth is critical in today's global economy, especially in African nations facing multifaceted challenges. Over recent decades, this connection has been a key area of focus for economic scholars, driving significant empirical research. Previous studies, which examined the dynamics of this relationship consistently underscore the profound interconnectedness of economic growth and political stability in the sense that, political instability hampers economic growth, while economic downturns can trigger political unrest and government collapse.

Our study empirically investigates the linkage between economic growth, political instability, and inequality in Africa, analyzing data from …