Economic Theory Commons^™

Random Assignments Of Bundles, Shurojit Chatterji, Liu Peng

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose a model studying the random assignments of bundles with no free disposal. The key difference between our model and the one where objects are allocated (see Bogomolnaia and Moulin (2001)) is one of feasibility. The implications of this difference are significant. Firstly, the characterization of sd-efficient random assignments is more complex. Secondly, we are able to identify a preference restriction, called essential monotonicity, under which the random serial dictatorship rule (extended to the setting with bundles) is equivalent to the probabilistic serial rule (extended to the setting with bundles). This equivalence implies the existence of a rule on …

The Classical Theory Of Supply And Demand, Sabiou M. Inoua, Vernon L. Smith

ESI Working Papers

This paper introduces and formalizes the classical view on supply and demand, which, we argue, has an integrity independent and distinct from the neoclassical theory. Demand and supply, before the marginal rev-olution, are defined not by an unobservable criterion such as a utility func-tion, but by an observable monetary variable, the reservation price: the buyer’s (maximum) willingness to pay (WTP) value (a potential price) and the seller’s (minimum) willingness to accept (WTA) value (a potential price) at the marketplace. Market demand and supply are the cumulative distri-bution of the buyers’ and sellers’ reservation prices, respectively. This WTP-WTA classical view of …

Let’S Chat... When Communication Promotes Efficiency In Experimental Asset Markets, Brice Corgnet, Mark Desantis, David Porter

ESI Working Papers

The growing prevalence of stock market chat rooms and social media suggests communication between traders may affect market outcomes. Using data from a series of laboratory experiments, we study the causal effect of trader communication on the price efficiency of markets. We show that communication allows markets to convey private information more effectively. This effect is most pronounced when the communication platform publicizes a reputation score that might identify a person as not being truthful. This illustrates the need for market designers to consider social interactions when designing market institutions to leverage the social motives that foster information aggregation.

Blockchain Technology And The Future Of Video Games, Is Presence Still Relevant?, Stef Nicovich, Jessica Scheld

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

No abstract provided.

An Empirical Study Of The Sentiment Capital Asset Pricing Model, Soroush Ghazi, Mark Schneider

ESI Working Papers

What is market sentiment? This paper takes a new approach to this question and de- rives a formula for market sentiment as a function of the risk-free rate, the price/dividend ratio, and the conditional stock market volatility. The formula is derived from a representative agent with a prospect theory probability weighting function. We estimate the model and find that our sentiment measure correlates positively with the leading sentiment indexes. The model matches the equity premium while generating a low and stable risk-free rate with low risk aversion. We also apply the model to explain other anomalies for the aggregate stock …

Categorical Salience Theory, Mark Schneider, Cary Deck, Patrick Dejarnette

ESI Working Papers

Monetary lotteries are the overwhelmingly predominant tool for understanding decisions under risk. However, many real-world decisions concern multidimensional out- comes involving different goods. Recent studies have tested whether people treat multidimensional risky choices in the same manner as unidimensional monetary lotteries and found that choices over consumer goods are less risk-averse and more consistent with expected utility theory than choices over monetary lotteries. While these puzzling results cannot be explained by any standard model of decision making, we demonstrate that these findings are predicted by a salience-based model of category-dependent preferences that also explains the classic anomalies for choices under …

The Relative Price Of Capital And Economic Structure, Roberto Samaniego, Juliana Yu Sun

Research Collection School Of Economics

Are trends in the price of capital technological in nature? First, we find that trends in the relative price of capital vary significantly across countries. We then show that a multi-industry growth model, calibrated to match differences in economic structure around the world and productivity growth rates across industries, accounts for this variation – mainly due to variation in the composition of capital. The finding indicates that the rate of change in the relative price of capital can be interpreted as investment-specific technical change – the extent to which productivity growth is relatively more rapid in the capital-producing sector. The …

Preferences With Changing Ambiguity Aversion, Jingyi Xue

Research Collection School Of Economics

We provide two extensions of Gilboa and Schmeidler (J Math Econ 18:141–153, 1989)’s maxmin expected utility decision rule to accommodate a decision maker’s changing ambiguity attitudes. The two rules are, respectively, a weighted maxmin rule and a variant constraint rule. The former evaluates an act by a weighted average of its worst and best possible expected utilities over a set of priors, with the weights depending on the act. The latter evaluates an act by its worst expected utility over a neighborhood of a set of approximating priors, with the size of the neighborhood depending on the act. Canonical representations …

Harnessing The Power Of Social Incentives To Curb Shirking In Teams, Brice Corgnet, Brian C. Gunia, Roberto Hernán González

ESI Working Papers

We study several solutions to shirking in teams that trigger social incentives by reshaping the workplace social context. Using an experimental design, we manipulate social pressure at work by varying the type of workplace monitoring and the extent to which employees engage in social interaction. This design allows us to assess the effectiveness as well as the popularity of each solution. Despite similar effectiveness in boosting productivity across solutions, only organizational systems involving social interaction (via chat) were at least as popular as a baseline treatment. This suggests that any solution based on promoting social interaction is more likely to …

Working Too Much For Too Little: Stochastic Rewards Cause Work Addiction, Brice Corgnet, Simon Gaechter, Roberto Hernán González

ESI Working Papers

People are generally assumed to shy away from activities generating stochastic rewards, thus re-quiring extra compensation for handling any additional risk. In contrast with this view, neurosci-ence research with animals has shown that stochastic rewards may act as a powerful motivator. Applying these ideas to the study of work addiction in humans, and using a new experimental paradigm, we demonstrate how stochastic rewards may lead people to continue working on a re-petitive and effortful task even after monetary compensation becomes saliently negligible. In line with our hypotheses, we show that persistence on the work task is especially pronounced when the …

Adam Smith’S Theory Of Value: A Reappraisal Of Classical Price Discovery, Sabiou M. Inoua, Vernon L. Smith

ESI Working Papers

The relevance of Adam Smith for understanding human morality and sociality is recognized in the growing interest in his work on moral sentiments among scholars of various academic backgrounds. But, paradoxically, Adam Smith’s theory of economic value enjoys a less prominent stature today among economists, who, while they view him as the “father of modern economics”, considered him more as having had the right intuitions about a market economy than as having developed the right concepts and the technical tools for studying it. Yet the neoclassical tradition, which replaced the classical school around 1870, failed to provide a satisfactory theory …

Incorporating Macroprudential Financial Regulation Into Monetary Policy, Aaron Klein

Journal of Financial Crises

This paper proposes two insights into financial regulation and monetary policy. The first enhances understanding the relationship between them, building on the automobile metaphor that describes monetary policy: when to accelerate or brake for curves miles ahead. Enhancing the metaphor, financial markets are the transmission. In a financial crisis, markets cease to function, equivalent to a transmission shifting into neutral. This explains both monetary policy’s diminished effectiveness in stimulating the economy and why the financial crisis shock to real economic output greatly exceeded central bank forecasts.

The second insight is that both excess leverage and fundamental mispricing of asset values …

News-Driven Expectations And Volatility Clustering, Sabiou M. Inoua

ESI Publications

Financial volatility obeys two fascinating empirical regularities that apply to various assets, on various markets, and on various time scales: it is fat-tailed (more precisely power-law distributed) and it tends to be clustered in time. Many interesting models have been proposed to account for these regularities, notably agent-based models, which mimic the two empirical laws through a complex mix of nonlinear mechanisms such as traders switching between trading strategies in highly nonlinear way. This paper explains the two regularities simply in terms of traders’ attitudes towards news, an explanation that follows from the very traditional dichotomy of financial market participants, …

Restricted Probabilistic Fixed Ballot Rules And Hybrid Domains, Shurojit Chatterji, Souvik Roy, Soumyarup Sadhukhan, Arunava Sen, Huaxia Zeng

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study Random Social Choice Functions (or RSCFs) in a standard ordinal mech-anism design model. We introduce a new preference domain called a hybrid domain which includes as special cases as the complete domain and the single-peaked domain. We characterize the class of unanimous and strategy-proof RSCFs on these domains and refer to them as Restricted Probabilistic Fixed Ballot Rules (or RPFBRs). These RSCFs are not necessarily decomposable, i.e., cannot be written as a convex combina-tion of their deterministic counterparts. We identify a necessary and sufficient condition under which decomposability holds for anonymous RPFBRs. Finally, we provide an axiomatic justification …

Citizen-Consumers Wanted: Revitalizing The American Dream In The Face Of Economic Recessions, 1981-2012, Gokcen Coskuner-Balli

Business Faculty Articles and Research

This article brings sociological theory of governmentality to bear on a longitudinal analysis of American presidential speeches to theorize the formation of the citizen-consumer subject. The 40-year historical analysis which expands through four economic recessions and the presidential terms of Ronald Reagan, William J. Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Hussein Obama, illustrates the ways in which the national mythology of American Dream myth has been linked to the political ideology of the state to create the citizen-consumer subject in the United States. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data demonstrates first, the consistent emphasis on responsibility as a …

“Once A Lawyer, Now A Security Guard… And Anybody Can Realize How Much It Is Hurting, Right?” The Experiences Of Deskilling Among Skilled, Minoritized Immigrants In Waterloo Region, Southwestern Ontario, Karun Karki

Lyle S. Hallman Social Work Theses and Dissertations

Canadian immigration policy by and large is dominated by attracting the Economic Class immigrants, with a commitment to long-term labour market goals. The employment integration of immigrants, however, shows that many highly educated and skilled immigrants are barred from practicing in their own professions. This study investigated the deskilling experiences of skilled, minoritized immigrants of the Federal Skilled Worker program, residing in Waterloo region, a mid-sized urban centre in Southwestern Ontario. Given that employment is one of the key indicators of immigrant integration, and considering the gaps in the literature, I conducted a mixed-method study that examined the factors contributing …

The Economist’S Vision For 2020, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

The global economy will have stable but sluggish growth due to the macro environment

Non-Increasing Cost Functions: Making The Connection Between Keynesian And Neoclassical Macroeconomics, Max Von Holtzendorff

Theses - Graduate Programs in Economic Theory and Policy

No abstract provided.

An Economic Analysis Of Cyber Warfare Governance Models, Kevin M. Kelleher

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Allusions to death delivered by bits and bytes have been in vogue since the Reagan administration. Yet, as the internet and its connected devices have since proliferated, cyber violence remains far more fiction than fact. Nevertheless, prominent U.S. officials have all but assured the eventuality of a devastating attack. In anticipation, political, legal, and industry experts are now seeking to codify and inculcate international norms to govern acts of war prosecuted via cyberspace. Two of the most prominent governance models to emerge are the Tallinn Manual and Microsoft’s Digital Geneva Convention. The driving thesis of this research argues that within …

The Impact Of Paying For Forest Conservation On Perceived Tenure Security In Ecuador, Kelly W. Jones, Nicolle Etchart, Margaret Holland, Lisa Naughton-Treves, Rodrigo A. Arriagada

Forest Collaborative Research

We study the impact of Ecuador’s national forest conservation incentives program on reported land conflicts. Data come from a survey of > 900 households located within 49 indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian communities holding communal conservation contracts.We use quasi-experimental methods to test for relationships between program participation and changes in land conflicts. Respondents reported that the program reduced land conflicts when households resided in communities with de facto communal tenure arrangements (vs. de facto semiprivate arrangements).We find no evidence that the conservation incentive program increased land conflicts. These results counter concerns that conservation payments undermine land tenure security; in some cases perceived tenure …

Against Monetary Functionalism: A Social Ontology Of Money, James Payne

Honors Program Theses

This paper explores the concepts of individualism and holism in social ontology through an analysis of the ontology of money by integrating insights from the Critical Realist tradition as well as the distinction between metaphysical grounds and anchors. In doing so it examines alternative explanations of money's ontology like the paradigmatic approach of John Searle. The results of the inquiry are then connected in relation to the models of social explanation in mainstream economics.

Hedonic Games And Monte Carlo Simulation, Sheida Etemadidavan, Andrew J. Collins

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Hedonic games have applications in economics and multi-agent systems where the grouping preferences of an individual is important. Hedonic games look at coalition formation, amongst the players, where players have a preference relation over all the coalition. Hedonic games are also known as coalition formation games, and they are a form of a cooperative game with a non-transferrable utility game. Some examples of hedonic games are stable marriage, stable roommate, and hospital/residence problem. The study of hedonic games is driven by understanding what coalition structures will be stable, i.e., given a coalition structure, no players have an incentive to deviate …

Municipal Fiscal Distress In Pennsylvania: Assessing The Municipalities Financial Recovery Act 47 Of 1987, Terry Tracy

West Chester University Doctoral Projects

In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Department of Community and Economic Development administers a Municipal Financial Recovery program to improve outcomes in fiscally and socio-economically distressed cities. The program operates under the auspices of the Pennsylvania Municipal Recovery Act 47 of 1987.

It is designed to provide state and municipal governments the resources necessary to combat fiscal distress and economic decline, where municipalities lack the political or financial wherewithal to do so autonomously. Those resources include access to grant funding, special latitude over tax policy and fee structures not otherwise permitted by Pennsylvania’s Constitution, and developing a five-year fiscal recovery …

Naloxone Access And Opioid Use: A Theoretical Analysis, Caroline Dunsby

Honors Theses

Naloxone, commonly known by the brand name Narcan, is a medication that reverses the potentially fatal effects of an opioid overdose. Amidst the opioid epidemic that has taken tens of thousands of lives each year, many policies have been enacted to increase the public's access to naloxone, allowing non-medical personnel to save lives. There have been two distinct reactions to these policies. Those that support the policies state that harm reduction measures are necessary to save lives. Those that oppose the policies claim that by providing naloxone, states may be increasing risky opioid use - suggesting that naloxone leads to …

Modern Monetary Theory, Tristan Rabbitt

Economics Honors Papers

No abstract provided.

Simon Nelson Patten, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

A brief biographical article on Simon Patten, the German-trained social economist who coined the term social work and continued to make contributions to social work and social welfare throughout his career.

Social Agglomeration Forces And The City, Peter A. Luff

Library Map Prize

The presence of “agglomeration forces” in production markets is widely accepted and has been recently quantified in the economics literature. Social scientists have done little theoretical work, however, and even less quantitative work, on how the logic of agglomeration might also apply to social groups and the gains that people derive from their social interactions. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by modeling and measuring the benefits in terms of social prestige that arose from the spatial concentration of socialites in Manhattan in the 1920s. I formulate a model of location-based social status determination that illustrates why these benefits …

Airline Fare Competition In The Post-Merger Era, Parker Michael Armstrong

Honors Theses and Capstones

This paper expands on the research of competition within the airline industry. This analysis estimates the fare-impact of new full-service or low-cost competition in city-pair markets in the domestic United States. Given the comprehensive restructuring of the airline industry as a result of the Delta-Northwest, United-Continental, and American-US Airways mergers, this analysis examines how the fare-impact of competition may have changed since the pre-merger era. This paper suggests evidence of a weaker effect regarding the entry of a low-cost carrier and a stronger effect regarding the entry of a legacy carrier in the post-merger era relative to the pre-merger period. …

Does Starting School Before Labor Day Affect High School Retention And Graduation: Evidence From Virginia's Kings Dominion Law, Timothy M. Komarek, Jay K. Walker

Economics Faculty Publications

Several states have required K-12 public schools to start after Labor Day in an effort to aid the tourism and hospitality industry. However, little is known about how these policies impact educational outcomes. We examine the impact of Virginia's post-Labor Day school start law on high school retention and graduation rates. We use a difference-in-differences model to exploit exogenous variation in school division start dates. Our results show small differences of up to three weeks have little effect on high school dropout and graduation rates. Our findings inform the debate on post-Labor Day school start laws and compulsory attendance age …

Price Value Frazer Duncan Collar Bienenfeld, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes:

• Classical theory of price matrix algebra by Anwar Shaikh (unpublished work).
• Marx's last theorem by Anwar Shaikh (unpublished work).
• Sraffa prices and eigenvector normalization by Anwar Shaikh (unpublished work).
• Vmi data set patterns by Anwar Shaikh (unpublished work).
• Shaikh, A. (2003, December 22). In what sense is a non-negative matrix reducible to its eigenvalue moduli? (Unpublished manuscript note).
• Shaikh, A. (2006, April 10). Graphvmigini3, vmi80r.wf1 chart analysis. (Unpublished manuscript note).
• Shaikh, A. (2006, April 10). What is avg income share of top 20%, in a power law? (Unpublished manuscript note).
• Shaikh, A. (2006, April 14). Thermal …