Economic Theory Commons^™

Quantitative Description Of The Pastoral Economy Of Western Tuvan Nomads, Paul L. Hooper

ESI Publications

Nomadic pastoralism persists at a substantial scale in Tuva and neighboring regions of Inner Asia. Tuvan pastoral lifeways reflect adaptations to both local environments and current economic realities. Much of our quantitative understanding of the economics of Tuvan nomads is derived from data collected in the first half of the 20th century. Accordingly, this paper provides an updated picture of the inner workings of nomadic households using data collected in Barun-Khemchik and Bai-Taiga provinces in 2013–2015. It analyzes herd composition and size, and compares the frequency of different animals kept today with values recorded in Tuva in 1916 and 1931. …

Local Dominance, Emiliano Catonini, Jingyi Xue

SMU Economics and Statistics Working Paper Series

We define a local notion of weak dominance that speaks to the true choice problems among actions in a game tree and does not necessarily require to plan optimally for the future. A strategy is (globally) weakly dominant if and only if it prescribes a locally weakly dominant action at every decision node it reaches, and in this case local weak dominance is characterized by a (wishful-thinking) condition that requires no forward planning. From this local perspective, we identify form of contingent reasoning that are particularly natural, despite the absence of an obviously dominant strategy (Li, 2017). Following this approach, …

On Strategy-Proofness And The Salience Of Single-Peakedness In A Private Goods Economy, Shurojit Chatterji, Masso Jordi, Serizawa Shigehiro

Research Collection School Of Economics

We consider strategy-proof rules operating on a rich domain of preference profiles in a set up where multiple private goods have to be assigned to a set of agents with entitlements where preferences display satiation. We show that if the rule is in addition "desirable", in that it is tops-only, continuous, same-sided and individually rational with respect to the entitlements, then the preferences in the domain have to satisfy a variant of single-peakedness (referred to as smilattice single-peakedness). We also provide a converse of this main finding. It turns our that this domain coincides with the one already identified in …

Productivity Loss Associated With Functional Disability In A Contemporary Small-Scale Subsistence Population, Jonathan Stieglitz, Paul L. Hooper, Benjamin C. Trumble, Hillard Kaplan, Michael D. Gurven

ESI Publications

In comparative cross-species perspective, humans experience unique physical impairments with potentially large consequences. Quantifying the burden of impairment in subsistence populations is critical for understanding selection pressures underlying strategies that minimize risk of production deficits. We examine among forager-horticulturalists whether compromised bone strength (indicated by fracture and lower bone mineral density, BMD) is associated with subsistence task cessation. We also estimate the magnitude of productivity losses associated with compromised bone strength. Fracture is associated with cessation of hunting, tree chopping, and walking long distances, but not tool manufacture. Age-specific productivity losses from hunting cessation associated with fracture and lower BMD …

Deliberation Enhances The Confirmation Bias In Politics, David L. Dickinson

ESI Publications

The confirmation bias, unlike other decision biases, has been shown both empirically and in theory to be enhanced with deliberation. This suggests that limited attention, reduced deliberation, or limited available cognitive resources may moderate this bias. We aimed to test this hypothesis using a validated confirmation bias task in conjunction with a protocol that randomly assigned individuals to one week of at-home sleep restriction (SR) or well-rested (WR) sleep levels. We also used a measure of cognitive reflection as an additional proxy for deliberation in our analysis. We tested the hypotheses that the confirmation bias would be stronger for WR …

Does Bitcoin Use Affect Crime Rates?, Kevin Keane

The Corinthian

Bitcoin is the most widely used cryptocurrency in the world because of its decentralized network that completes user-to-user transactions, eliminating the need for intermediaries. During 2017, the volume of Bitcoin transactions totaled $94.3 trillion. Bitcoin transactions are recorded in a public database called the blockchain. Although the blockchain can keep track of how many transactions there are, it can’t identify the people involved in transactions. The lack of identity increases the anonymity of Bitcoin transactions, making it less detectable when used for crime. Using the Uniform Crime Reporting’s state-level crime rate data and blockchain’s Bitcoin transaction information, I estimate the …

A Letter To The United States Government On Wealth And Income Inequality, Matthieu Maier

English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World

The United States of America is the world’s hotspot when it comes to income and wealth inequality. The wealthiest Americans are accumulating more and more wealth everyday while most Americans, who fall somewhere around middle-class, remain struggling and stagnant. The United States’ unchecked and deregulated system of capitalism is the root cause of our country’s inequities along with our government’s refusal to set aside self-interests and biases in order to combat these issues. From the inequality caused by rouged American systems larger issues are created that lead to complications in health, wages, standard of living, and race relations within our …

Speed Traps: Algorithmic Trader Performance Under Alternative Market Structures, Yan Peng, Jason Shachat, Lijia Wei, S. Sarah Zhang

ESI Working Papers

Using laboratory experiments, we illustrate that trading algorithms that prioritize low latency pose certain pitfalls in a variety of market structures and configurations. In hybrid double auctions markets with human traders and trading agents, we find superior performance of trading agents to human traders in balanced markets with the same number of human and Zero Intelligence Plus (ZIP) buyers and sellers only, thus providing a partial replication of Das et al. (2001). However, in unbalanced markets and extreme market structures, such as monopolies and duopolies, fast ZIP agents fall into a speed trap and both human participants and slow ZIP …

A Theory Of Cultural Revivals, Murat Iyigun, Jared Rubin, Avner Seror

ESI Working Papers

Why do some societies have political institutions that support productively inefficient outcomes? And why does the political power of elites vested in these outcomes often grow over time, even when they are unable to block more efficient modes of production? We propose an explanation centered on the interplay between political and cultural change. We build a model in which cultural values are transmitted inter-generationally. The cultural composition of society, in turn, determines public good provision as well as the future political power of elites from different cultural groups. We characterize the equilibrium of the model and provide sufficient conditions for …

The Revealed Preference Theory Of Stable Matchings With One-Sided Preferences, Gaoji Hu, Jiangtao Li, Rui Tang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We investigate the testable implications of the theory of stable matchings in two-sided matching markets with one-sided preferences. Our main result connects the revealed preference analysis to the well-known lattice structure of the set of stable matchings, and tests the rationalizability of a data set by analyzing the joins and meets of matchings.

Robust Virtual Implementation With Almost Complete Information, Takashi Kunimoto

Research Collection School Of Economics

Artemov, Kunimoto, and Serrano (2013a,b, henceforth, AKS) study a mechanism design problem where arbitrary restrictions are placed on the set of first-order beliefs of agents. Calling these restrictions Δ, they adopt Δ-rationalizability (Battigalli and Siniscalchi, 2003) and show that Δ-incentive compatibility and Δ-measurability are necessary and sufficient conditions for robust virtual implementation, which implies that virtual implementation is possible uniformly over all type spaces consistent with Δ-restrictions. By appropriately defining Δ in order to restrict attention to complete information environments and thereafter explicitly modelling the assumption of complete information in the language of type spaces, I re-establish the permissive implementation …

Data For "An Experimental Investigation Of Health Insurance Policy And Behavior", J. Dustin Tracy, Hillard Kaplan, Kevin James, Stephen Rassenti

ESI Data Sets

We introduce a new experimental approach to measuring the effects of health insurance policy alternatives on behavior and health outcomes over the life course. Cash-motivated subjects are placed in a virtual environment where they earn income and allocate it across multi-period lives. We compare behavior across age, income and insurance plans---one priced according to an individual's expected cost and the other uniformly priced through employer-implemented cost sharing. We find that 1) subjects in the employer-implemented plan purchased insurance at higher rates; 2) the employer-based plan reduced differences due to income and age; 3) subjects in the actuarial plan engaged in …

The Effect Of Sleep On Public Good Contributions And Punishment: Experimental Evidence, Jeremy Clark, David L. Dickinson

ESI Publications

We investigate the effect of a full week of sleep restriction (SR) vs. well-restedness (WR) on contributions in a common public good experiment, the voluntary contributions mechanism (VCM). We examine the effect of sleep manipulation on decisions regarding both contributions and punishment of non-contributors. Actigraphy devices are used to confirm that our random assignment to sleep condition generates significant differences in objective nightly sleep duration and sleepiness. We find that when punishment is unavailable public good contributions do not differ by SR/WR assignment. When punishment is available, we find evidence that SR subjects contribute more than WR subjects, respond more …

Rapidly Declining Body Temperature In A Tropical Human Population, Michael Gurven, Thomas Kraft, Sarah Alami, Juan Copajira Adrian, Edhitt Cortez Linares, Daniel Cummings, Daniel Eid Rodriguez, Paul L. Hooper, Adrian Jaeggi, Raul Quispe Gutierrez, Ivan Maldonado Suarez, Edmond Seabright, Hillard Kaplan, Jonathan Stieglitz, Benjamin C. Trumble

ESI Publications

Normal human body temperature (BT) has long been considered to be 37.0°C. Yet, BTs have declined over the past two centuries in the United States, coinciding with reductions in infection and increasing life expectancy. The generality of and reasons behind this phenomenon have not yet been well studied. Here, we show that Bolivian forager-farmers (n = 17,958 observations of 5481 adults age 15+ years) inhabiting a pathogen-rich environment exhibited higher BT when first examined in the early 21st century (~37.0°C). BT subsequently declined by ~0.05°C/year over 16 years of socioeconomic and epidemiological change to ~36.5°C by 2018. As predicted, …

A Model To Explain Statewide Differences In Covid-19 Death Rates, James L. Doti

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

COVID-19 death rates per 100,000 vary widely across the nation. As of September 1, 2020, they range from a low of 4 in Hawaii to a high of 179 in New Jersey. Although academic research has been conducted at the county and metropolitan levels, no research has rigorously examined or identified the demographic and socioeconomic forces that explain state-level differences. This study presents an empirical model and the results of regression tests that help identify these forces and shed light on the role they play in explaining COVID-19 deaths.

A stepwise regression model we tested exhibits a high degree of …

The Role Of Dispersal And School Attendance On Reproductive Dynamics In Small, Dispersed Populations: Choyeros Of Baja California Sur, Mexico, Shane Macfarlan, Ryan Schacht, Eric Schniter, Juan José Garcia, Diego Guevara Beltran, Jory Lerback

ESI Publications

Individuals from small populations face challenges to initiating reproduction because stochastic demographic processes create local mate scarcity. In response, flexible dispersal patterns that facilitate the movement of individuals across groups have been argued to reduce mate search costs and inbreeding depression. Furthermore, factors that aggregate dispersed peoples, such as rural schools, could lower mate search costs through expansion of mating markets. However, research suggests that dispersal and school attendance are costly to fertility, causing individuals to delay marriage and reproduction. Here, we investigate the role of dispersal and school attendance on marriage and reproductive outcomes using a sample of 54 …

Unparalleled Opportunities Or Unmitigated Risk? Economic Globalization And Its Impact On State Capacity In The Developing World, John M. Zak

Student Publications

Economic globalization is a phenomenon driving major developments in the international system. With the force of this phenomenon shaping events within states and interactions among them, the question of economic globalization’s impact on state capacity is worthy of an in-depth analysis. In this work I use economic globalization as the central explanatory variable and state capacity as the dependent variable and seek to establish an empirical relationship between the two that will offer the social science community a better understanding of how this phenomenon is shaping state capacity in developing countries. Based on available scholarship, I argue that economic globalization …

Interim Rationalizable Implementation Of Functions, Takashi Kunimoto, Rene Saran, Roberto Serrano

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper investigates rationalizable implementation of social choice functions (SCFs) in incomplete information environments. We identify weak interim rationalizable monotonicity (weak IRM) as a novel condition and show that weak IRM is a necessary and almost sufficient condition for rationalizable implementation. We show by means of an example that interim rationalizable monotonicity (IRM), found in the literature, is strictly stronger than weak IRM as its name suggests, and that IRM is not necessary for rationalizable implementation, as had been previously claimed. The same example also demonstrates that Bayesian monotonicity, the key condition for full Bayesian implementation, is not necessary for …

A Taxonomy Of Non-Dictatorial Domains, Shurojit Chatterji, Huaxia Zeng

Research Collection School Of Economics

We provide an exhaustive classification of all preference domains that allow the design of unanimous social choice functions (henceforth, rules) that are non-dictatorial and strategy-proof. This taxonomy is based on a richness assumption and employs a simple property of two-voter rules called invariance. The preference domains that form the classification are semi-single-peaked domains (introduced by Chatterji et al. (2013)) and semi-hybrid domains (introduced here) which are two appropriate weakenings of the single-peaked domains, and which, more importantly, are shown to allow strategy-proof rules to depend on non-peak information of voters’ preferences. As a refinement of the classification, single-peaked domains and …

Human Flourishing And The Subjective Dimension Of Work, Geoffrey Friesen

Department of Finance: Faculty Publications

This essay considers the Christian understanding of the subjective dimension of human work and the implications for economics, finance, and the modern firm. The biblical account of people profoundly captures the fullness of human nature and the role of work and economy in developing the full person. People’s reality is both individual and collective, encompassing their subjective interior and objective exterior dimensions of reality. This issue is important because economic models affect economic decisions, and these decisions help shape social reality. Current economic and financial models are problematic because they are self-limiting: They close off certain outcomes by assuming they …