Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Other Economics Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Economic Theory

Institution
Keyword
Publication Year
Publication
Publication Type
File Type

Articles 271 - 300 of 707

Full-Text Articles in Other Economics

Institutions, Opportunism And Prosocial Behavior: Some Experimental Evidence, Antonio Cabrales, Irma Clots-Figueras, Roberto Hernán-González, Praveen Kujal May 2020

Institutions, Opportunism And Prosocial Behavior: Some Experimental Evidence, Antonio Cabrales, Irma Clots-Figueras, Roberto Hernán-González, Praveen Kujal

ESI Working Papers

Formal or informal institutions have long been adopted by societies to protect against opportunistic behavior. However, we know very little about how these institutions are chosen and their impact on behavior. We experimentally investigate the demand for different levels of institutions that provide low to high levels of insurance and its subsequent impact on prosocial behavior. We conduct a large-scale online experiment where we add the possibility of purchasing insurance to safeguard against low reciprocity to the standard trust game. We compare two different mechanisms, the private (purchase) and the social (voting) choice of institutions. Whether voted or purchased, we …


Information Aggregation And The Cognitive Make-Up Of Traders, Brice Corgnet, Mark Desantis, David Porter May 2020

Information Aggregation And The Cognitive Make-Up Of Traders, Brice Corgnet, Mark Desantis, David Porter

ESI Working Papers

We assess the effect of the cognitive make-up of traders on the informational efficiency of markets. We put forth that cognitive skills, such as cognitive reflection, are crucial for ensuring the informational efficiency of markets because they endow traders with the ability to infer others’ information from prices. Using laboratory experiments, we show that information aggregation is significantly enhanced when (i) all traders possess high levels of cognitive sophistication and (ii) this high level of cognitive sophistication is common information for all traders. Our findings shed light on the cognitive and informational constraints underlying the efficient market hypothesis.


Neoclassical Supply And Demand, Experiments, And The Classical Theory Of Price Formation, Sabiou M. Inoua, Vernon L. Smith May 2020

Neoclassical Supply And Demand, Experiments, And The Classical Theory Of Price Formation, Sabiou M. Inoua, Vernon L. Smith

ESI Working Papers

"The 1870s neoclassical marginal revolution in economics culminated a century later in a striking conclusion: The core utility maximization principle of neoclassical economics was shown to have no interesting implication for aggregate market behavior (Sonnenschein, 1972, 1973a, 1973b; Debreu, 1974; Mantel, 1974; Kirman, 1989; Shafer & Sonnenschein, 1993; Rizvi, 2006). We argue that neoclassical price theory was founded on two axioms—price-taking behavior and the law of one price in a market—that, if imposed on the theory, were logically inconsistent with a theory of market price formation. This logical gap in neoclassical theory was filled essentially with thought experiments: Jevons derives …


Exchange Rate Regimes And Economic Growth, Amandarae Matthew Apr 2020

Exchange Rate Regimes And Economic Growth, Amandarae Matthew

Undergraduate Theses

This paper explores the relationship between economic growth and exchange rate regimes among countries of lower income, lower middle income, upper middle income, and high-income countries. Countries must make careful consideration when choosing an exchange rate regime because each regime can have different long-term effects. A cross section pooled time series data will be used for a sample of 42 countries over the period of 2000-2018. Multiple models will examine the various relationships between types of exchange rate regimes, changes in exchange rate regimes, and economic growth. The components of the models being tested include political stability, change in terms …


A Test Of The Modigliani-Miller Theorem, Dividend Policy And Algorithmic Arbitrage In Experimental Asset Markets, Tibor Neugebauer, Jason Shachat, Wiebke Szymczak Apr 2020

A Test Of The Modigliani-Miller Theorem, Dividend Policy And Algorithmic Arbitrage In Experimental Asset Markets, Tibor Neugebauer, Jason Shachat, Wiebke Szymczak

ESI Working Papers

Modigliani and Miller showed that the market value of the company is in dependent of its capital structure, and suggested that dividend policy makes no difference to this law of one price. We experimentally test the MM theorem in a complete market with two simultaneously traded assets, employing two experimental treatment variations. The first variation involves the dividend stream. According to this variation the dividend payout order is either identical or independent. The second variation involves the market participation, or not, of an algorithmic arbitrageur. We find that Modigliani-Miller's law of one price can be supported on average with or …


Viral Social Media Videos Can Raise Pro-Social Behaviours When An Epidemic Arises, Youting Guo, Jason Shachat, Matthew J. Walker, Lijia Wei Apr 2020

Viral Social Media Videos Can Raise Pro-Social Behaviours When An Epidemic Arises, Youting Guo, Jason Shachat, Matthew J. Walker, Lijia Wei

ESI Working Papers

At the onset of an epidemic, can viral social media videos induce the high levels of trust and pro-sociality required for a successful community response? Shortly after the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus in Wuhan, China, we conducted an experiment assessing the impact of viral videos on individual preferences and pro-social behaviour. Prior to the experiment, participants viewed one of three videos culled from Chinese social media: a central government leader visiting a local hospital and supermarket, health care volunteers transiting to Wuhan, or an emotionally neutral video unrelated to the emergency. Viewing one of the first two videos leads …


The Classical Theory Of Supply And Demand, Sabiou M. Inoua, Vernon L. Smith Mar 2020

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 Mar 2020

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.


An Empirical Study Of The Sentiment Capital Asset Pricing Model, Soroush Ghazi, Mark Schneider Feb 2020

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 Feb 2020

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 …


Harnessing The Power Of Social Incentives To Curb Shirking In Teams, Brice Corgnet, Brian C. Gunia, Roberto Hernán González Feb 2020

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 Feb 2020

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 Feb 2020

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 …


News-Driven Expectations And Volatility Clustering, Sabiou M. Inoua Jan 2020

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, …


Citizen-Consumers Wanted: Revitalizing The American Dream In The Face Of Economic Recessions, 1981-2012, Gokcen Coskuner-Balli Jan 2020

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 …


Airline Fare Competition In The Post-Merger Era, Parker Michael Armstrong Jan 2020

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 Racial Discrimination Exist In The Nba?, Logan Kendall Jan 2020

Does Racial Discrimination Exist In The Nba?, Logan Kendall

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This paper aims to examines the affect of race on compensation for NBA players. Based on prior research, I pose the hypothesis that racial discrimination does exist in the NBA with there being a premium for white players. A second hypothesis I present based on the previous research is that the premium for white players exist for only some groups of players and for other groups there with not exist discrimination based on player race. By using career data from every player who played in the 2019-2020 NBA season and their 2019-2020 salaries, a few different models where ran. The …


The Impact Of Production Budgets On Theatrical Vs. Non-Theatrical Revenues In The Movie Industry, Naveen Shastri Jan 2020

The Impact Of Production Budgets On Theatrical Vs. Non-Theatrical Revenues In The Movie Industry, Naveen Shastri

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis discusses the impact of movie production budgets on various revenue ratios. An OLS regression equation was created that compares the production budget of a movie to one of three movie revenue ratios. These ratios can be attributed to the relative elasticities of each revenue metric (domestic DVD sales, domestic box office revenues, and foreign box office revenues). Among other results, it seems that the elasticity for domestic DVD sales was relatively greater than the one representing domestic box office revenues. Also, foreign box office elasticities were relatively larger than either domestic revenue variable. These results imply different trends …


A Theory Of Fire Service Provision: With An Empirical Analysis Of Response Time, Suppression Time, And Service Output, Hyong-Gu Hwang Jan 2020

A Theory Of Fire Service Provision: With An Empirical Analysis Of Response Time, Suppression Time, And Service Output, Hyong-Gu Hwang

Senior Independent Study Theses

We introduce a two-stage theoretical framework of fire services that justifies the status of response time as a factor input. In the first stage, the provincial government distributes a budget to its cities, resulting in varied numbers of firefighters and fire engines in each city. In the second stage, each city fire department places its fire stations at spatially optimal locations that minimize expected response times. When a fire occurs, the outputs from these two stages are actualized into dispatch level, response time, and suppression time. These intermediate outputs are then transformed into inputs for producing service output, which is …


All Pay Quality-Bids In Score Procurement Auctions, Dan Kovenock, Jingfeng Lu Jan 2020

All Pay Quality-Bids In Score Procurement Auctions, Dan Kovenock, Jingfeng Lu

ESI Working Papers

In this paper, we study score procurement auctions with all-pay quality bids. A supplier’s score is the difference between his quality and price bids. The supplier with the highest score wins and gets paid his own price bid. The procurer’s payoff is the difference between the winner’s quality and the procurer’s payments to the suppliers. Equilibrium quality and price bids are solved without first obtaining the corresponding equilibrium scores. We find that quality bids, the suppliers’ payoffs and the procurer’s payoff do not depend on whether price bids are made contingent on quality bids. Compared to a benchmark of winner-pay …


Rationally Inattentive Savers And Monetary Policy Changes: A Laboratory Experiment, Andrea Civelli, Cary Deck, Antonella Tutino Jan 2020

Rationally Inattentive Savers And Monetary Policy Changes: A Laboratory Experiment, Andrea Civelli, Cary Deck, Antonella Tutino

ESI Working Papers

We study the response of consumption and saving decisions of rationally inattentive individuals to changes in monetary policy in the laboratory. First, we theoretically characterize the choices of a rationally inattentive agent processing information about the interest rate. Then, we design an experiment with induced inattention to test for the predictions of the model, contrasting them to the full information case. Consistent with the predictions, experimental subjects (a) increase attention when utility gains exceed cognitive costs of tracking the policy rate and decrease savings when their perceived economic outlook deteriorates; (b) respond to Delphic, but not Odyssean, forms of forward …


Reconsidering Rational Expectations And The Aggregation Of Diverse Information In Laboratory Security Markets, Brice Corgnet, Cary Deck, Mark Desantis, Kyle Hampton, Erik O. Kimbrough Jan 2020

Reconsidering Rational Expectations And The Aggregation Of Diverse Information In Laboratory Security Markets, Brice Corgnet, Cary Deck, Mark Desantis, Kyle Hampton, Erik O. Kimbrough

ESI Working Papers

The ability of markets to aggregate dispersed information is a cornerstone of economics and finance. In a seminal experiment, Plott and Sunder (1988) offer support for the rational expectations hypothesis. However, recent laboratory experiments have called into question the robustness of those initial results. In this paper, we offer the first attempt to directly replicate key findings of the original study. Failing to replicate their results, the post-study probability that market performance is better described by rational expectations than the prior information (Walrasian) model is low. Given this result, we introduce a new treatment that implements a market structure consistent …


An Experimental Comparison Of News Vending And Price Gouging, Zuzana Brokesova, Cary Deck, Jana Peliova Jan 2020

An Experimental Comparison Of News Vending And Price Gouging, Zuzana Brokesova, Cary Deck, Jana Peliova

ESI Working Papers

The newsvendor problem is a workhorse model in operation management research. We introduce a related game that operates in the price dimension rather than the inventory dimension: the price gouging game. Using controlled laboratory experiments, we compare news vending and price gouging behavior. We replicate the standard pull-to-center effect for news vending and find that the equivalent pattern occurs with price gouging. Further, we find that the pull-to-center is asymmetric both for newsvendors and price gougers. More broadly, the experimental results reveal that choices are similar across the theoretically isomorphic games, suggesting that observed behavior in newsvendor experiments is representative …


Reference Dependent Prices In Bargaining: An Experimental Examination Of Precise First Offers, Erik O. Kimbrough, David Porter, Mark Schneider Jan 2020

Reference Dependent Prices In Bargaining: An Experimental Examination Of Precise First Offers, Erik O. Kimbrough, David Porter, Mark Schneider

ESI Working Papers

Evidence from psychology and marketing suggests that those who make a "precise" first offer in bargaining get a better deal than those who make a "round" first offer. We report on a series of experiments designed to test for and improve our understanding of the "precise first offer" (PFO) effect in bargaining and whether it likely reflects rational optimizing or equilibrium behavior. Our experimental treatments vary whether decisions are incentivized and whether the PFO effect can emerge as an equilibrium of a cheap-talk signaling game. We find evidence of a PFO effect when subjects read a vignette and make unincentivized …


The Doors Of Perception, Gary Charness, Alessandro Sontuoso Dec 2019

The Doors Of Perception, Gary Charness, Alessandro Sontuoso

ESI Working Papers

We investigate how a player’s strategic behavior is affected by the set of notions she uses in thinking about the game, i.e., the “frame”. To do so, we consider matching games where two players are presented with a set of objects, from which each player must privately choose one (with the goal of matching the counterpart’s choice). We propose a novel theory positing that different player types are aware of different attributes of the strategy options, hence different frames; we then rationalize why differences in players’ frames may lead to differences in choice behavior. Unlike previous theories of framing, our …


Using Behavior Economic Nudges To Facilitate Client Follow-Through In Financial Coaching, Charlene Hurst Dec 2019

Using Behavior Economic Nudges To Facilitate Client Follow-Through In Financial Coaching, Charlene Hurst

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While benevolence-based programs have been a large part of meeting immediate financial needs of the poor, they lack the relational aspect needed to facilitate long-term behavior change. Recently many social service organizations have adopted financial coaching as a promising replacement for benevolence programming. The field of coaching has dealt with its own challenges. Most coaching practitioners surveyed in 2016 and 2019 acknowledged lack of client follow-through as their number one challenge. Behavior economics offered nudges as a solution. Nudges are cues placed within the physical environment to prod clients toward behavior change. A quantitative field study was conducted to evaluate …


Harnessing The Power Of Social Incentives To Curb Shirking In Teams, Brice Corgnet, Brian C. Gunia, Roberto Hernán González Dec 2019

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 …


News-Driven Expectations And Volatility Clustering, Sabiou M. Inoua Dec 2019

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

ESI Working Papers

Financial volatility obeys two well-established empirical properties: it is fat-tailed (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 computational models, which typically invoke complicated mechanisms, however. It can be shown that trend-following speculation generates the power law in an intrinsic way. But this model cannot exaplain clustered volatility. This paper extends the model and offers a simple explanation for clustered volatility: the impact of exogenous news on traders’ expectations. Owing to the famous no-trade results, rational expectations, the dominant model of news-driven expectations, is hard …


Price Signaling And Bargain Hunting In Markets With Partially Informed Populations, Mark Schneider, Daniel Graydon Stephenson Nov 2019

Price Signaling And Bargain Hunting In Markets With Partially Informed Populations, Mark Schneider, Daniel Graydon Stephenson

ESI Working Papers

Classical studies of asymmetric information focus on situations where only one side of a market is informed. This study experimentally investigates a more general case where some sellers are informed and some buyers are informed. We establish the existence of semiseparating perfect Bayesian equilibria where prices serve as informative signals of quality to uninformed buyers, while informed buyers can often leverage their informational advantage by purchasing high quality items from uninformed sellers at bargain prices. These models provide a rational foundation for the co-existence of bargains, price signaling, and Pareto efficiency in markets with asymmetric information. We test these theoretical …


Identity And The Self-Reinforcing Effects Of Norm Compliance, Mark A. Pickup, Erik O. Kimbrough, Eline A. Rooij Nov 2019

Identity And The Self-Reinforcing Effects Of Norm Compliance, Mark A. Pickup, Erik O. Kimbrough, Eline A. Rooij

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

When making political and economic decisions (e.g., voting, donating money to a cause), individuals consider the expectations of groups with which they identify. These expectations are injunctive norms, shared beliefs about appropriate behavior for identity group members, and individuals' choices reflect trade‐offs between adherence to these norms and other preferences. We show that when those who identify moderately/strongly with the group pay a cost as a consequence of avoiding a norm violation, they subsequently view the norms as stronger than those that paid no cost. This is evident in their greater willingness to pay an additional cost to punish/reward other …