Economic Theory Commons^™

Match Stability With A Costly And Flexible Number Of Positions, James Gilmore

Behavioral and Computational Economics (MS) Theses

One of the objectives of two-sided matching mechanisms is to pair two groups of agents such that there is no incentive for pair deviation. The outcome of a match can significantly impact participants. While much of the existing research in this field addresses the matching with fixed quotas, this is not always applicable. We introduce the concept of slot stability, recognizing the potential motivation for organizations to modify their quotas after the match. We propose an algorithm designed to create stable and slot stable matches by employing flexible, endogenous quotas to address this issue.

The Lottery Colonel Blotto Game With Draws, Jingzhi Liu

Behavioral and Computational Economics (MS) Theses

This study presents a novel exploration of the lottery Colonel Blotto game. This adaptation introduces the possibility of draws or ties, moving beyond the traditional winner-take-all framework. The inclusion of the possibility of a draw allows for a more realistic depiction of contests where players may arbitrarily split the value of a battlefield in the absence of a decisive victory. Our model is characterized by the number of battlefields, battlefield values that may vary across battlefields, but are symmetric across players, the distinct player shares of each battlefield value captured in the event of a draw, the potentially asymmetric budgets …

Economic Anomalies Following The Handover Of Hong Kong, Nathan Martin

Economics Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper seeks to examine and provide a possible explanation for economic anomalies in Hong Kong following its handover to China. Hong Kong was on a 99-year lease to the United Kingdom from China before being handed back over July 1^st, 1997. Due to the “one country, two systems” policy espoused in the handover agreement that was to be implemented for fifty years, this event marks a rare natural experiment of a peaceful regime change without a significant change in governance. This paper seeks to understand the impact of the act of regime change on selected key macroeconomic …

A Red Awakening: An Analysis Of China’S Quest For Global Dominance Through Economic Alternative Warfare Methods, Sarah Beddingfield

Senior Honors Theses

In the 2023 annual meeting of China’s parliament, Chinese President Xi made it clear to his political leaders and the world that he was preparing for war. This should come as no surprise after analysis of China's grand strategy points clearly to the intent to surpass the U.S. as the premier global superpower in all respects. China has been building towards this goal for years through untraditional methods of warfare, forcing the national security community to reevaluate its own strategy and assess the Chinese threat through a different lens. This thesis seeks to address one specific area in which China …

Increases In Regional Brain Volume Across Two Native South American Male Populations, Nikhil N. Chaudhari, Phoebe E. Imms, Nathan F. Chowdhury, Margaret Gatz, Benjamin Trumble, Wendy J. Mack, E. Meng Law, M. Linda Sutherland, James D. Sutherland, Christopher J. Rowan, L. Samuel Wann, Adel H. Allam, Randall C. Thompson, David E. Michalik, Michael I. Miyamoto, Guido Lombardi, Daniel Cummings, Edmond Seabright, Sarah Alami, Angela R. Garcia, Daniel E. Rodriguez, Raul Quispe Gutierrez, Adrian J. Copajira, Paul L. Hooper, Kenneth Buetow, Jonathan Stieglitz, Michael D. Gurven, Gregory S. Thomas, Hillard Kaplan, Caleb E. Finch, Andrei Irimia

ESI Publications

Industrialized environments, despite benefits such as higher levels of formal education and lower rates of infections, can also have pernicious impacts upon brain atrophy. Partly for this reason, comparing age-related brain volume trajectories between industrialized and non-industrialized populations can help to suggest lifestyle correlates of brain health. The Tsimane, indigenous to the Bolivian Amazon, derive their subsistence from foraging and horticulture and are physically active. The Moseten, a mixed-ethnicity farming population, are physically active but less than the Tsimane. Within both populations (N = 1024; age range = 46–83), we calculated regional brain volumes from computed tomography and compared …

Incorporating Institutions And Ideology: Why Covid Didn't Change Anything, Cullen Kendrick

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

In this paper, I investigate the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic through an economic and philosophical lens to try and understand why government aid was removed. Looking at the problem as solely a structural issue, with Jurgen Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms and Douglas North’s Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance guiding my understanding, provides useful insights. Namely, how the informal and formal structures of society interact, and their cyclical nature. However, that perspective does not provide a complete picture. And so, I developed an understanding of ideology to investigate the origins of informal societal structures. To do this I …

Cooperation In Temporary Partnerships, Gabriele Camera, Alessandro Gioffré

ESI Working Papers

The literature on cooperation in infinitely repeated Prisoner’s Dilemmas covers the extreme opposites of the matching spectrum: partners, a player’s opponent never changes, and strangers, a player’s opponent randomly changes in every period. Here, we extend the analysis to settings where the opponent changes, but not in every period. In these temporary partnerships, players can deter some deviations by directly sanctioning their partner. Hence, relaxing the extreme assumption of one-period matchings can support some cooperation also off equilibrium because a class of strategies emerges that are less extreme than the typical “grim” strategy. We establish conditions supporting full …

Despertando Del Sueño Americano: U.S. Policies Influencing Cartel Profitability From Undocumented Border Crossing, Gisela Martinez Acosta

Undergraduate Theses

Due to U.S. border policies limiting safe and lawful passage, cartels have developed an industry in the U.S.-Mexico border that supplies crossing services to migrants, utilizing coercive means to regulate the market and profiting from migrant’s desperation to enter the country. This study combines economic and ethnographic research to describe the human smuggling industry and the impact it has in the migrant journey. Scarcity, inelastic demand, black markets, and monopolies are economic concepts used to understand the operations of these services. Observational research and interviews conducted in the Sonoran Desert are also included to present this topic humanely. Background on …

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 …