Other Economics Commons^™

An Epigenetic Clock Analysis Of Race/Ethnicity, Sex, And Coronary Heart Disease, Steve Horvath, Michael Gurven, Morgan E. Levine, Benjamin C. Trumble, Hillard Kaplan, Hooman Allayee, Beate R. Ritz, Brian Chen, Ake T. Lu, Tammy M. Rickabaugh, Beth D. Jamieson, Dianjianyi Sun, Shengxu Li, Wei Chen, Lluis Quintana-Murci, Maud Fagny, Michael S. Kobor, Philip S. Tsao, Alexander P. Reiner, Kerstin L. Edlefsen, Devin Absher, Themistocles L. Assimes

ESI Publications

Background: Epigenetic biomarkers of aging (the “epigenetic clock”) have the potential to address puzzling findings surrounding mortality rates and incidence of cardio-metabolic disease such as: (1) women consistently exhibiting lower mortality than men despite having higher levels of morbidity; (2) racial/ethnic groups having different mortality rates even after adjusting for socioeconomic differences; (3) the black/white mortality cross-over effect in late adulthood; and (4) Hispanics in the United States having a longer life expectancy than Caucasians despite having a higher burden of traditional cardio-metabolic risk factors.

Results: We analyzed blood, saliva, and brain samples from seven different racial/ethnic groups. …

The Influence Of The Electric Supply Industry On Economic Growth In Less Developed Countries, Edward Richard Bee

Dissertations

This study measures the impact that electrical outages have on manufacturing production in 135 less developed countries using stochastic frontier analysis and data from World Bank’s Investment Climate surveys. Outages of electricity, for firms with and without backup power sources, are the most frequently cited constraint on manufacturing growth in these surveys.

Outages are shown to reduce output below the production frontier by almost five percent in Africa and by a lower percentage in South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. Production response to outages is quadratic in form. Outages also increase labor cost, reduce exports …

Associations Between Male Testosterone And Immune Function In A Pathogenically Stressed Forager-Horticultural Population, Benjamin C. Trumble, Aaron D. Blackwell, Jonathan Stieglitz, Melissa Emery Thompson, Ivan Maldonado Suarez, Hillard Kaplan, Michael Gurven

ESI Publications

Objectives—Despite well-known fitness advantages to males who produce and maintain high endogenous testosterone levels, such phenotypes may be costly if testosterone-mediated investment in reproductive effort trade-off against investment in somatic maintenance. Previous studies of androgen-mediated trade-offs in human immune function find mixed results, in part because most studies either focus on a few indicators of immunity, are confounded by phenotypic correlation, or are observational. Here the association between male endogenous testosterone and 13 circulating cytokines are examined before and after ex vivo antigen stimulation with phytohaemagglutinin (PHA) and lipopolysaccharides (LPS) in a high pathogen population of Bolivian forager-horticulturalists.

Materials …

Multiple Openings And Competitiveness Of Forward Markets: Experimental Evidence, José Luis Ferreira, Praveen Kujal, Stephen Rassenti

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

We test the competition enhancing effect of selling forward in experimental Cournot duopoly and quadropoly with multiple forward markets. We find that two forward periods yields competitive outcomes and that the results are very close to the predicted theoretical results for quantity setting duopolies and quadropolies. Our experiments lend strong support to the hypothesis that forward markets are competition enhancing. We then test a new market that allows for endogenously determined indefinitely many forward periods that only close when sellers coordinate on selling a zero amount in a forward market. We find that the outcomes under an endogenous close rule …

Indirect Reciprocity, Resource Sharing, And Environmental Risk: Evidence From Field Experiments In Siberia, E. Lance Howe, James J. Murphy, Drew Gerkey, Colin Thor West

ESI Publications

Integrating information from existing research, qualitative ethnographic interviews, and participant observation, we designed a field experiment that introduces idiosyncratic environmental risk and a voluntary sharing decision into a standard public goods game. Conducted with subsistence resource users in rural villages on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Northeast Siberia, we find evidence consistent with a model of indirect reciprocity and local social norms of helping the needy. When participants are allowed to develop reputations in the experiments, as is the case in most small-scale societies, we find that sharing is increasingly directed toward individuals experiencing hardship, good reputations increase aid, and the …

Health Costs Of Reproduction Are Minimal Despite High Fertility, Mortality And Subsistence Lifestyle, Michael Gurven, Megan Costa, Ben Trumble, Jonathan Stieglitz, Bret Beheim, Daniel Eid Rodriguez, Paul L. Hooper, Hillard Kaplan

ESI Publications

Women exhibit greater morbidity than men despite higher life expectancy. An evolutionary life history framework predicts that energy invested in reproduction trades-off against investments in maintenance and survival. Direct costs of reproduction may therefore contribute to higher morbidity, especially for women given their greater direct energetic contributions to reproduction. We explore multiple indicators of somatic condition among Tsimane forager-horticulturalist women (Total Fertility Rate = 9.1; n = 592 aged 15–44 years, n = 277 aged 45+). We test whether cumulative live births and the pace of reproduction are associated with nutritional status and immune function using longitudinal data spanning 10 …

John Nash: A Personal Remembrance (Introduction To The John Forbes Nash Jr. Memorial Special Issue), Vernon Smith

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

In January of 2011, three years after his 80th birthday, Games and Economic Behavior published a special issue to honor John Nash. In their introductory note, the editors, Avinash Dixit, Ehud Kalai and Stephen Morris wrote: “We are delighted to have the privilege of coordinating this expression of the whole profession's admiration and appreciation of John Nash and his work, and look forward to a repeat in ten or even twenty years' time.”

This wish was sadly interrupted by tragedy. On their way back from the ceremony awarding John the Abel Prize in mathematics, John and his wife Alicia were …

High Resting Metabolic Rate Among Amazonian Forager-Horticulturalists Experiencing High Pathogen Burden, Michael Gurven, Benjamin C. Trumble, Jonathan Stieglitz, Gandhi Yetish, Daniel Cummings, Aaron D. Blackwell, Bret Beheim, Hillard Kaplan, Herman Pontzer

ESI Publications

Objectives—Resting metabolic rate (RMR) reflects energetic costs of homeostasis and accounts for 60-75% of total energy expenditure (TEE). Lean mass and physical activity account for much RMR variability, but the impact of prolonged immune activation from infection on human RMR is unclear in naturalistic settings. We evaluate the effects of infection on mass-corrected RMR among Bolivian forager-horticulturalists, and assess whether RMR declines more slowly with age than in hygienic sedentary populations, as might be expected if older adults experience high pathogen burden.

Materials and Methods—RMR was measured by indirect calorimetry (Fitmate MED, Cosmed) in 1,300 adults aged 20-90 …

Dynamic Behavior And Player Types In Majoritarian Multi-Battle Contests, Alan Gelder, Dan Kovenock

ESI Working Papers

In a dynamic contest where it is costly to compete, a player who is behind must decide whether to surrender or to keep fighting in the face of bleak odds. We experimentally examine the game theoretic prediction of last stand behavior in a multi-battle contest with a winning prize and losing penalty, as well as the contrasting prediction of surrendering in the corresponding contest with no penalty. We find varied evidence in support of these hypotheses in the aggregated data, but more conclusive evidence when scrutinizing individual player behavior. Players’ realized strategies tend to conform to one of several “types”. …

Immune Function In Amazonian Horticulturalists, Aaron D. Blackwell, Benjamin C. Trumble, Ivan Maldonado Suarez, Jonathan Stieglitz, Bret Beheim, J. Josh Snodgrass, Hillard Kaplan, Michael Gurven

ESI Publications

Background—Amazonian populations are exposed to diverse parasites and pathogens, including protozoal, bacterial, fungal, and helminthic infections. Yet much of our understanding of the immune system is based on industrialised populations where these infections are relatively rare.

Aim—We examine distributions and age-related differences in 22 measures of immune function for Bolivian forager-horticulturalists and US and European populations.

Subjects and Methods—Subjects were 6,338 Tsimane aged 0–90 years. Blood samples collected between 2004–2014 were analysed for 5-part blood differentials, C-reactive protein, erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), and total immunoglobulins E, G, A, and M. Flow cytometry was used to quantify naive …

Mean-Dispersion Preferences With A Specific Dispersion Function, Mark Schneider, Manuel Nunez

ESI Working Papers

A popular approach to modeling ambiguity aversion is to decompose preferences into the subjective expected utility of an act and an ambiguity index, or an adjustment factor, or a dispersion function. However, in these approaches the dispersion function (or ambiguity index, or adjustment factor) has very little structure imposed on it, leaving the selection of a specific dispersion function in applications to be rather arbitrary. In this note, working in the Anscombe- Aumann (1963) framework, we provide a simpler axiomatic characterization of mean-dispersion preferences which uniquely identifies the dispersion function from the infinite class of possible alternatives. Given the representation, …

Designing Contests Between Heterogeneous Contestants: An Experimental Study Of Tie-Breaks And Bid-Caps In All-Pay Auctions, Aniol Llorente-Saguer, Roman M. Sheremeta, Nora Szech

ESI Working Papers

A well-known theoretical result in the contest literature is that greater heterogeneity decreases performance of contestants because of the “discouragement effect.” Leveling the playing field by favoring weaker contestants through bid-caps and favorable tie-breaking rules can reduce the discouragement effect and increase the designer’s revenue. We test these predictions in an experiment. Our data show that indeed, strengthening weaker contestants through tie-breaks and bid-caps significantly diminishes the discouragement effect. Bid-caps can also improve revenue. Most deviations from Nash equilibrium can be explained by the level-k model of reasoning.

Information Effects In Uniform Price Multi-Unit Dutch Auctions, Joy A. Buchanan, Steven Gjerstad, David Porter

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

We design a multi-unit descending-price (Dutch) auction mechanism that has applications for resource allocation and pricing problems. We address specific auction design choices by theoretically and experimentally determining optimal information disclosure along two dimensions. Bidders are either informed of the number of bidders in the auction, or know that it is one of two possible sizes; they also either know the number of units remaining for sale or are unaware of how many units have been taken by other bidders. We find that revealing group size decreases bids, and therefore revenue, if units remaining are not shown. When group size …

The Fair And Impartial Spectator, Vernon L. Smith

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

Adam Smith’s metaphor of the impartial spectator is an essential element in understanding his model of the maturation process whereby people learn to follow general rules that honor the human sentiments of gratitude and resentment in others. Through the impartial spectator human action, subject to error, is governed by self-command. Smith’s model is presented in the form of a series of propositions.

An Experimental Investigation Of Procurement Auctions With Asymmetric Sellers, John Aloysius, Cary A. Deck, Li Hao, Ryan French

ESI Publications

Electronic reverse auctions are a commonly used procurement mechanism. Research to date has focused on suppliers who are ex ante symmetric in that their costs are drawn from a common distribution. However, in many cases a seller's range of potential costs depends on their own operations, location, or economies of scale and scope. Thus, understanding how different bidder types impact auction outcomes is key when designing an auction. This paper reports the results of the first controlled laboratory experiment designed to compare prices between first-price and second-price procurement auctions for homogeneous goods when seller cost types are asymmetric and the …

State Dependent Price Setting Rules Under Implicit Thresholds: An Experiment, Justin Deloy Leblanc, Andrea Civelli, Cary A. Deck, Klajdi Bregu

ESI Publications

How firms make their pricing decisions is a fundamental question of macroeconomics. We use a laboratory experiment to examine individual choices in a price updating task that provide insight into how well state dependent models reflect behavior. We find that in general subjects behave as if they recognize the importance of a state dependent pricing strategy, but they are unable to ascertain this threshold with precision and they also exhibit a substantial degree of time dependence. As a result, they update prices too frequently, and perform statistically significantly fewer real effort profit-generating tasks than theoretically optimal under full state dependence, …

Can Nba Teams Benefit From Losing?, Ryan P. Hallisey

Honors Scholar Theses

It has been speculated that franchises in the NBA (national basketball association) lose on purpose because of the benefits that coincide with a team having a poor overall record. Teams that perform the worst are given the highest draft selections in the following season's rookie player draft, thus theoretically improving their chances of becoming a more winning team. Previous economists have used various methodology to prove that NBA teams do in fact lose on purpose; or tank. This paper builds upon this previous methodology to examine the direct impact, negative or positive, that losing on purpose has had on various …

Salience, Framing, And Decisions Under Risk, Uncertainty, And Time, Jonathan W. Leland, Mark Schneider

ESI Working Papers

We propose a comparative model of decision making under risk, uncertainty, and time, in which large differences in payoffs and probabilities or dates of receipt are perceived as salient and overweighted in the evaluation process. The predictions of the model depend on what differences are compared across alternatives which, in turn, depends on how the choice is framed. We formalize a class of matrix-based frames which applies to decisions under risk, uncertainty, and time, and we specify two important types of frames within this class: minimal frames which provide the simplest representation of choice alternatives, and transparent frames which make …

The Effects Of Alcohol Use On Economic Decision Making, Klajdi Bregu, Cary Deck, Lindsay Ham, Salar Jahedi

ESI Working Papers

It is notoriously hard to study the effect of alcohol on decision making, given the selection that takes place in who drinks alcohol and when they choose to do so. In a controlled laboratory experiment, we study the causal effect of alcohol on economic decision making. We examine the impact of alcohol on the following types of tasks: math and logic, uncertainty, overconfidence, strategic games, food choices, anchoring, and altruism. Our results indicate that alcohol consumption, as measured by the blood alcohol concentration (BAC), increases cooperation in strategic settings and altruism in Dictator games. We do not find any effects …

Optimal Tilts, Malcom Baker, Terence C. Burnham, Ryan Taliaferro

ESI Working Papers

We examine the optimal weighting of four characteristic tilts in US equity markets over the period from 1968 through 2014. We define a “tilt” as a positive-Sharpe-ratio, characteristicbased portfolio strategy that requires relatively low annual turnover and a “trade” as a characteristic-based portfolio strategy that requires relatively high annual turnover and liquidity demands. Size is a tilt, because of its very low turnover; high frequency reversal is a trade. This dichotomy is necessary to make practical use of Fama-French style factor regressions. Unlike low-turnover tilts, a full history of transaction costs and an estimate of capacity is critical to determine …

Arousal And Economic Decision Making, Salar Jahedi, Cary Deck, Dan Ariely

ESI Working Papers

Previous experiments have found that subjecting participants to cognitive load leads to poorer decision making, consistent with dual-system models of behavior. Rather than taxing the cognitive system, this paper reports the results of an experiment that takes a complementary approach: arousing the emotional system. The results indicate that exposure to arousing visual stimuli as compared to neutral images has a negligible impact on performance in arithmetic tasks, impatience, risk taking in the domain of losses, and snack choice although we find that arousal modestly increases in risk-taking in the gains domain and increases susceptibility to anchoring effects. We find the …

The Financial Power Of The Powerless: Socio-Economic Status And Interest Rates Under Weak Rule Of Law, Timur Kuran, Jared Rubin

ESI Publications

In advanced economies interest rates vary inversely with the borrower's socio-economic status, which itself depends inversely on default risk. These relationships depend on the impartiality of the law. Where the law is markedly biased in favour of certain groups, the latter will pay a surcharge for capital. Legal power, as measured by privileges before the law, thus undermines financial power, the capacity to borrow cheaply. Developing this argument, this paper also tests it through judicial records from Ottoman Istanbul, 1602-1799. Three privileged Ottoman groups—men, Muslims, and titled elites—all paid relatively high interest rates conditional on various loan characteristics.

Does Context Information Affect Perceptions Of The Intrinsic Value Of Visual Art?, Kelsey Ferguson

Inquiry: The University of Arkansas Undergraduate Research Journal

This study is an application of cultural economic value theory within the context of visual art. Current literature supports an incompatibility between objective, empirical economic research and the subjectivity of artistic expression. While variables affecting the intrinsic value of art are difficult to identify and measure, this study quantified the effect of context information on university students’ perceptions of visual art. For this study, 118 randomly assigned University of Arkansas students viewed four identical works of art and answered identical questions designed to measure perceptions of intrinsic value. Despite a hypothesis that context would positively affect participants’ reports, when significant …

Insatiability And Crisis: Using Interdisciplinarity To Understand (And Denaturalize) Contemporary Humans, Sean P. Macdonald, Costas Panayotakis

Publications and Research

This chapter illustrates how collaboration between different social sciences can encourage students to think critically about prevailing assumptions regarding human nature. Both the chapter and the pedagogical experience on which it is based investigate the distinctive type of human created by capitalist society. In so doing, it takes a heterodox approach to analyzing the concept of an insatiable human nature through a case study that invites students to critically assess this perspective. This discussion then leads to an investigation and critique of traditional neoclassical Economic assumptions about human behavior, which forms the basis for a case study on the causes …

Religious Identity And The Provision Of Public Goods: Evidence From The Indian Princely States, Latika Chaudhary, Jared Rubin

ESI Publications

This paper describes a simple model of how a ruler’s religious identity affects public goods provision. Our primary insight is that rulers reduce public goods expenditures to a greater degree when there are privately-provided substitutes excludable by religion.The basic idea is that if the good is provided privately to the ruler’s co-religionists, the ruler faces weaker incentives to provide this public good because his co-religionists receive lower marginal utility from its provision. Testing such a conjecture is an empirical challenge, however, since the religious identity of rulers rarely varies over time and place. We address this problem by exploiting …

The Impact Of State-Provided Paid Family Leave On Wages: Examining The Role Of Gender, Aimee Samantha Abrams Widdicombe

Scripps Senior Theses

The U.S. is the only OECD country that does not offer any form of federal paid parental leave. Only three states—California, New Jersey and Rhode Island—have state-provided paid leave policies; implemented in 2004, 2009 and 2014, respectively. Through descriptive statistics and difference-in-difference-in-difference regression analyses of the wages of women and men of childbearing age (19-45 years) in those three states, we assess whether the paid leave programs have effected wages, and whether these effects vary depending on gender. Our results show that wages of women of childbearing age saw negligible net effects post-policy in policy states, although statistically insignificant. On …

Causes And Consequences Of The Protestant Reformation, Sascha O. Becker, Steven Pfaff, Jared Rubin

ESI Working Papers

The Protestant Reformation is one of the defining events of the last millennium. Nearly 500 years after the Reformation, its causes and consequences have seen a renewed interest in the social sciences. Research in economics, sociology, and political science increasingly uses detailed individual-level, city-level, and regional-level data to identify drivers of the adoption of the Reformation, its diffusion pattern, and its socioeconomic consequences. This survey takes stock of the research so far, tries to point out what we know and what we do not know, and which are the most promising areas for future research.

Payment Scheme Self-Selection In The Credence Goods Market: An Experimental Study, Hernan Bejarano, Ellen P. Green, Stephen Rassenti

ESI Working Papers

Given heterogeneity in expert behavior across payment schemes in credence goods markets, it becomes important to understand the consequences of payment scheme selection. To study the effect on customer well being of expert self-selection, we recruited subjects to participate in a real-effort credence good laboratory market. Experts were either randomly assigned or faced with the choice of three payment schemes: fee-for-service, salary, and capitation. We found that experts who selected fee-for-service payment resulted in customers with significantly worse outcomes in comparison with experts who had been randomly assigned to fee-for-service. In contrast, experts who selected salary payment did not change …

Bringing A Natural Experiment Into The Laboratory: The Measurement Of Individual Risk Attitudes, Zuzana Brokesova, Cary Deck, Jana Peliova

ESI Working Papers

Controlled laboratory experiments have become a generally accepted method for studying economic behavior, but there are two issues that regularly arise with such work. The first pertains to the ability to generalize experimental results outside the laboratory. While laboratory experiments are typically designed to mimic naturally occurring situations, ceteris paribus comparisons are rare. Using data from a promotional campaign by a bank and a matching laboratory experiment, we find similar patterns of risk taking behavior controlling for gender and age. The second issue pertains to the impact that the payment procedure in an experiment has on observed risk taking behavior. …

The Impact Of Taxes And Wasteful Government Spending On Giving, Roman M. Sheremeta, Neslihan Uler

ESI Working Papers

We examine the impact of taxes and wasteful government spending on charitable giving. In our model, the government collects a flat-rate tax on income net of donations and wastes part of the tax revenue before redistribution. The model provides theoretical predictions which we test in a framed field experiment. The results of the experiment show that the tax rate has a weak and insignificant effect on giving. The degree of waste, however, has a large, negative and significant effect on giving, with the relationship moderated by the curvature in the utility function.