Economic Theory Commons^™

Conflict-Mediated Group Size Regulation: A Theory Of Supraoptimal And Suboptimal Group Size, Eric Schniter

ESI Working Papers

Observed group sizes rarely match the size that would maximize what each member gets from belonging. We propose a two-part theory in which group size is regulated by two related conflicts: insider-outsider conflict over admission, and within-group conflict as crowding, competition, and social tensions intensify with size. Three strategies are available: admission, exclusion, and fission. The first part shows that even when exclusion is unavailable, fission dynamics alone drive group size away from the optimum in both directions, with the pattern set by how prospective joiners encounter groups and by the geometry of fission. When joiners compare groups across a …

Locally Robust Implementation Of Efficient Bilateral Trade With Correlated Beliefs, Takashi Kunimoto, Cuiling Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We identify the ex ante welfare (EAW) condition as a necessary requirement to implement ex post efficient bilateral trade in any finite type space with interdependent values and correlated beliefs. As these finite settings become finer to approximate a continuous type space, we derive a limit EAW condition by taking the EAW condition in finite settings to its limit. We show that this limit condition trivially holds in the benchmark continuous setting admitting a full-support density function. We then insist on locally robust implementation by requiring efficient trade to be implemented uniformly across all finite type spaces that approximate the …

[Review Of] The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete For Wealth, Power And People, Steven Pfaff

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

A review of Paul Seabright's The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People.

A Theoretical And Empirical Framework To Estimate The Impact Of Conflict On The Economic Resilience Of Clustered Firms In Ukraine, Alexander D. Ginn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I develop a theoretical and empirical framework to estimate whether participation in industrial clusters contributes to firm-level economic resilience to conflict-based shocks. Focusing on Ukraine following the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, the study situates industrial organization and firms’ resilience to conflict within a dynamic environment characterized by spatially heterogeneous exposure to conflict events and persistent institutional constraints. I document how Ukraine’s contemporary economic geography reflects the interaction of Soviet-era industrial path dependence, uneven post-transition institutional development, and conflict-induced reconfiguration, evaluating how these dynamics generate systematic variation in both firms’ baseline vulnerability and their exposure to …

Neoliberalism & The Care Economy: Exploring The Gendered Impacts Of Social Protection Systems, Rachel Carruthers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how neoliberal transformation of social protection policy influences gender dynamics within the care economy. Care is necessary for well-being, but traditionally excluded from economic thinking. This thesis completes a historical overview of how care has been incorporated or excluded by different economic paradigms and is anchored in feminist political economy that emphasizes care as a central consideration. A comparative analysis across California, Texas, and Sweden demonstrates how social protection, specifically access to paid parental leave, varies across regimes and results in inconsistent care outcomes. The findings suggest that social protections can reduce some inequalities, but inadequately address …

The Dictatorial Public Goods Game, Gabriele Camera, Gary Charness, Nir Chemeya, Ro'i Zultan

ESI Working Papers

We propose a novel game, the Dictatorial Public Goods Game, to study the interplay between collective resource generation and centralized provision of public goods. After making choices in a standard Voluntary Contribution Mechanism (VCM), one player is selected from the group to administrate the contributions: either provide the public good or expropriate the collected resources for personal gain. We find that adding this centralized mechanism reduces efficiency compared to the standard VCM. Although higher contributions increase the material incentive to expropriate, they lead to more provision. Thus, pro-social choices in the contribution and in the provision stages act as …

Transmission Of Firm-Level Demand Shocks To Stock Returns: Evidence From 10-K Text Analysis, Dylan Gunjan Parikh

Economics Undergraduate Senior Theses

Industrial organization and corporate finance papers that measure firm-level demand characteristics employ price, quantity, and product characteristic data that is unavailable in public financial disclosures. As a result, cross-sectional asset pricing literature attention to demand-side factors is limited. This paper constructs a demand shock measure from natural language processing of 28,263 publicly disclosed 10-K filings from 2001 to 2020. I find that a 1SD demand shock increases contemporaneously predicts a 1.8% increase (SE = 0.4%) in returns. Long-short portfolio sorted on demand shock generates 8.5% alpha (SE = 1.9%) against combined Fama-French and Q-factor models and a 0.91 sharpe ratio …

The Cleansing Effect Of Technological Investment: An Empirical Analysis Of Episodic Labor Market Polarization (2000–2010), Adam Murphy

University Honors Theses

This paper investigates the episodic nature of labor market polarization in the United States between 2000 and 2010. While the Skill-Biased Technological Change (SBTC) framework may have successfully explained the rise of inequality in the 1980s, it struggled to account for the wage stagnation and hollowing out of the middle class that followed in the 1990s and 2000s. Utilizing Task-Biased Technological Change (TBTC) as a primary lens, this study examines how the codification of routine tasks allowed for the widespread substitution of middle-skill labor by technological capital. By synthesizing IPUMS-CPS occupational data with Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) investment statistics, …

Compellingness In Nash Implementation, Shurojit Chatterji, Takashi Kunimoto, Paulo Daniel Salles Ramos

Research Collection School Of Economics

A social choice function (SCF) is said to be Nash implementable (in pure strategies) if there exists a mechanism in which every pure-strategy Nash equilibrium induces outcomes specified by the SCF. The main objective of this paper is to assess the impact of considering mixed-strategy equilibria in Nash implementation. We define compelling Nash implementation as a case where the implementing mechanism possesses a pure-strategy equilibrium that strictly Pareto dominates any undesired mixed-strategy equilibrium. We show that if the finite environment and the SCF to be implemented jointly satisfy what we call Condition COM, then we can construct a finite …

Joan Robinson Rate Of Interest Paper, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes:

• Robinson, J. (1960). The rate of interest. In Collected economic papers (Vol. 2, pp. 246–265). Basil Blackwell. (Reprinted from Econometrica, 1951, 19(2), 92–111).

Interest Rate Lecture, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes:

• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). APE II interest rate lecture (Handwritten notes).
• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Gibson's paradox (Unpublished manuscript).
• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Interest rate patterns (Unpublished manuscript).

Fiscal And Monetary Policies For Inclusive Growth In Developing And Emerging Markets, Collins Anosike

Journal of Global Awareness

The study examined the effects of monetary and fiscal policies in attaining inclusive growth for some developing countries and emerging markets. The study selected 20 countries and grouped them into group one and group two. The study is unique because it captures a broader range of countries compared to previous studies and shows their effect on economic growth. We use panel data and employ OLS regression and Johansen cointegration. We examine how each variable, general government expenditure, gross national expenditure, total revenue, official exchange rate, broad money, and deposit interest rate, affects the dependent variable (real GDP) from 1980 to …

More Than The Sum Of Its Sexes: Functional Constraints, Embodied Capital, And Age-Structured Labor In Human Forager Economies, Eric Schniter, Hillard Kaplan, Brenda Bowser, Cari Goetz

ESI Publications

"The paper's rough consensus attributes the SDoL to differential variance in food returns across male- and female-typical foraging domains, sourcing this primarily to Bird and Codding (2015) and Kelly's (2013) reframe of the classic 'hunting vs. gathering' axis as 'risky vs. non-risky foraging.' Indeed, the data show that males more often pursue large game and honey, resources that yield higher caloric returns but with high unpredictability, injury risk, and failure rates. Females, especially those with dependent young, more often target plant foods and small game that produce steadier, lower-variance returns. But variance-buffering is a proximate ecological account, not a life …

Centralization Vs. Decentralization: First Evidence From The Laboratory, Gabriele Camera, Gary Charness, Nir Chemaya

ESI Working Papers

The future architecture of financial systems is a subject of contention, with centralized and decentralized governance proponents. Here we ask: would the architecture affect the quality of decision-making? We propose a game where financial network participants demarcate the ownership of claims to income. This governance task can be decentralized (shared authority), centralized (single authority), or hybrid (alternating authority). Without communication all architectures supported poor outcomes. With communication, decentralization ensured good governance and maximum profits, while centralization did not—lowering communication’s potency in promoting socially optimal decisions. This indicates there is scope for decentralization in innovating financial institutions.

The Marginal Sexual Equality Game: Defining The Incentives For Sexual Equality Using Economic Game Theory And Butler’S Gender Trouble, Blaise Bowers

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This project takes an interdisciplinary economic and gender studies approach to explain subversion, sexual equality, and the marginal nature of sexual rights. The project uses advanced economic game theory to derive the Marginal Sexual Equality Game Formula. The formula explains the various political-economic incentives for a minority gender/sexual identity’s subversion of dominance, a dominant sex's incentive to suppress, the impact of cooperation versus division among minority genders/sexual identities, incentives and impacts of cooperation between sects of minority genders/sexual identities and the dominant gender/sexual identity, and the various consequences of various social mobility and elasticity. Additionally, the formula proves and showcases …

The Impact Of Monetary Policy Announcements On Trading Reactions To Earnings Reports, Sean A. Maxfield

Economics Honors Projects

This paper examines trading reactions to quarterly earnings reports and the impact of recent monetary policy announcements by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). It argues that the market, as a product of rational and irrational investor behavior, interprets firms’ financial performance within a broader macroeconomic context, affirming the causal channels found in similar studies. This study differs from prior research by looking at the recent, not simultaneous, monetary policy announcement for each earnings announcement in order to understand if the two types of information remain complementary. By conducting an event study model, this study confirms that the interaction of …

When Wedding Bells Stop Ringing: An Economic Analysis Of The U.S. Fertility Crisis, Mia Sideris

Business and Economics Honors Papers

Fertility in the U.S. has been in steady decline since the Great Recession. Surveyed opinions suggest this trend stems less from changing attitudes in ideal family size, and more from tangible barriers preventing people from having as many children as they desire. This paper explores several economic and social pressures that may have contributed to this discrepancy, with an emphasis on marriage. Marriage is considered to be the infrastructure that enables childbearing by minimizing both monetary and time costs. Using fixed effects and random forest regression, we estimate the impact of these measures and their relative importance on fertility decisions. …

The Impatience Of Winning: An Analysis Of Time Discounting, Predictive Modeling, And The Nba Draft, Alec R. Plante

Business and Economics Honors Papers

This paper examines whether NBA draft decisions can be better explained by incorporating non-geometric time discounting into a model of general manager decision making. Using a dataset of 285 NBA draft prospects over a 12-year period, the impact of college statistics on Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) is determined, and these impact values are then used to create a “predicted” VORP for the first 4 seasons of each player’s career: a projection of what a general manager might think of a prospect’s future value given their college statistics. Following this, geometric and hyperbolic time discounting models are applied to estimate …

Rationalizable Incentives: Interim Rationalizable Implementation Of Correspondences, Takashi Kunimoto, Rene Saran, Roberto Serrano

Research Collection School Of Economics

Are there ways to enforce incentives free of equilibrium considerations? When the normative goals for a set of agents can be summarized in a set-valued rule and agents take actions that are rationalizable, a new theory of incentives emerges in which standard Bayesian incentive compatibility (BIC) is relaxed significantly. The paper studies the interim rationalizable implementation of social choice sets with a Cartesian product structure, a leading example thereof being ex-post efficiency. Setwise incentive compatibility (setwise IC), much weaker than BIC, is shown to be necessary for implementation. Setwise IC enforces incentives flexibly within the entire correspondence, instead of the …

The Effects Of Neighborhood And Interior Characteristics On Residential Sale Prices, Ella Hagman

Undergraduate Research Symposium Podium Presentations

This study analyses how certain neighborhood and interior characteristics affect residential sale prices, after accounting for standard property variables. This is important to examine in order to understand the function of the housing market, the sources of price differences, and whether residential values can be controlled by emphasizing specific desirable property features. The study is based on a dataset of approximately 330,000 observations from the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), as well as walkability data obtained from Walk Score. The data is analyzed in Stata, using three regression models with different combinations of explanatory variables. The results show that the model …