Economic Theory Commons^™

The Evolutionary Fitness Of Personality Traits In A Small-Scale Subsistence Society, Michael Gurven, Christopher Von Rueden, Jonathan Stieglitz, Hillard Kaplan, Daniel Eid Rodriguez

ESI Publications

"Personality, or “behavioral syndromes”, are relatively stable dispositional traits and behaviors that have now been identified in a myriad of social species (Gosling, 2001; Sih et al., 2004), and with clear consequences on fitness (Smith & Blumstein, 2008). The canalization of personality during development and relative stability thereafter, despite varying circumstances over the life course that might otherwise favor greater plasticity, is an important problem attracting much theoretical and empirical attention (Dall et al., 2004; Dingemanse et al., 2010). Further, personality is highly heritable, yet how heritable genetic variation in personality traits is maintained over generations remains another conundrum (Buss …

Bitcoin: Is Cryptocurrency Viable?, Austin Hill

CMC Senior Theses

Bitcoin, a virtual currency invented in 2009, was created as a peer-to-peer currency that eliminated the need for a third party authority, such as banks or government, to be involved in monetary transactions. Having no intrinsic value but carrying no government guarantees relegates bitcoin and its competitors to the perpetual role of investment opportunity, deriving value not from a practical use, but from a nominal, dollar value. This will continue to be the case until the U.S. Government sanctions virtual currency as a viable store of value. Because the dollar plays such a large role in the world’s economy, other …

Alienation In Capitalism: Rediscovering Fulfillment, Gregory Lee Carter

Honors Theses and Capstones

Many Americans are pessimistic about their country's medium or long-term economic outlook. A century ago, Big Business was born as an economic force, but it has powerfully infiltrated the realm of politics now. The corporate scramble for natural resources has caused global disharmony and domestic economic conflict in the U.S. The capitalist system, which many have come to realize is unsustainable and oppressive, has thus come to fulfill some of the predictions made by earlier critics from Kierkegaard, Rousseau, to Marx. Each believed that a society which is forced to accommodate an oppressive system will inherently display alienation. That …

Food Imports Under Foreign Exchange Constraints In The Cfa’S Franc Zone Of Sub-Saharan Africa (Ssa), Seydina Ousmane Sene

Theses and Dissertations--Agricultural Economics

To respond to the high imported food prices in their domestic markets, net food importing countries in the Communauté Financière Africaine (CFA) zone^[1] are adjusting their import tariffs and homologate domestic prices of imported commodities such as rice, wheat, maize, and sugar. This research uses a multivariate specification of error correction model (VECM) of estimation to investigate the link between food imports, world price index of rice, wheat, maize and sugar, real effective exchange rates, domestic food production, GDP, and trade openness in the short and long run. The data are on each homogenous commodity from 1969 to 2012. …

Money Is More Than Memory, Maria Bigoni, Gabriele Camera, Marco Casari

ESI Working Papers

Impersonal exchange is the hallmark of an advanced society. One key institution for impersonal exchange is money, which economic theory considers just a primitive arrangement for monitoring past conduct in society. If so, then a public record of past actions—or memory—supersedes the function performed by money. This intriguing theoretical postulate remains untested. In an experiment, we show that the suggested functional equality between money and memory does not translate into an empirical equivalence. Monetary systems perform a richer set of functions than just revealing past behaviors, which proves to be crucial in promoting large-scale cooperation.

Los Bancos Del Tiempo En España: Combatiendo La Recesión Con La Moneda Social, Marco Martellini

CMC Senior Theses

Un banco del tiempo (BDT) es el nombre formal que se le da a unas instituciones comunitarias que operan con horas de tiempo personal y laboral como moneda oficial. Son sistemas organizados de moneda social que permiten a sus usuarios intercambiar su propio tiempo y destreza en forma de créditos de servicio. La unidad de moneda es una hora de trabajo. Los BDT son parte de la categoría de moneda alternativa social y representan una evolución moderna de entidades clásicas como los trueques.

Los BDT valoran conceptos como compartir, igualdad y mutualismo. Así, funcionan como un sistema alternativo a los …

Cracking The Code On Stem: A People Strategy For Nevada's Economy Executive Summary, Jessica A. Lee, Mark Muro, Jonathan Rothwell, Scott Andes, Siddharth Kulkarni

Brookings Mountain West Publications

Nevada has in place a plausible economic diversification strategy—and it’s beginning to work. Now, the state and its regions need to craft a people strategy. Specifically, the state needs to boost the number of Nevadans who possess at least some postsecondary training in the fields of science, technology, engineering, or math—the so-called “STEM” disciplines (to which some leaders add arts and design to make it “STEAM”).

The moment is urgent—and only heightened by the projected worker needs of Tesla Motors’ planned “gigafactory” for lithium-ion batteries in Storey County.

Even before the recent Tesla commitment, a number of the more high-tech …

More Eigenvalue Math Notes, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes:

• Folder Cover Label
  Shaikh, A. (2014). NA-24-07. Department of Economics, New School for Social Research.This item is a folder cover label that marks research materials on economic matrix calculations.
• Handwritten Research Notes
  Shaikh, A. (2014). Price variations and classical price setting. Department of Economics, New School for Social Research.This item contains handwritten notes evaluating price variation and classical price setting based on the theories of David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and Piero Sraffa.
• Flight Booking Confirmation
  British Airways. (2014). London to Naples flight confirmation. British Airways.This item is a travel itinerary sheet detailing a flight …

Double Bubbles In Assets Markets With Multiple Generations, Cary Deck, David Porter, Vernon L. Smith

ESI Publications

We construct an asset market in a finite horizon overlapping-generations environment. Subjects are tested for comprehension of their fundamental value exchange environment and then reminded during each of 25 periods of the environment's declining new value. We observe price bubbles forming when new generations enter the market with additional liquidity and bursting as old generations exit the market and withdrawing cash. The entry and exit of traders in the market creates an M shaped double bubble price path over the life of the traded asset. This finding is significant in documenting that bubbles can reoccur within one extended trading horizon …

Ltv Re Adj Notes, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes:

• Ltvcalc1998stdreadjfixed.xmcd by Anwar Shaikh, PhD. (Unpublished work).
• Podkaminer, L. (2005). A note on the statistical verification of Marx: Comment on Cockshott and Cottrell. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 29(4), 657–658. Oxford University Press.
• Eigen_by_matrixsize_2002.xlsx by Anwar Shaikh, PhD. (Unpublished work).
• Shaikh, A. (2014). Variations in p(r) w.r.t to r/R come solely from subdominant term (Unpublished manuscript).

Agricultural Patenting: A Case Study Of Monsanto, Shannon Moran

Pepperdine Policy Review

In 2012, genetically-modified crops reached 170 million hectares around the globe. The ability to patent basic forms of life such as plant properties and the legal history of those intellectual property rights gives biotechnological companies such as Monsanto immense power in the vital agricultural sector. This article outlines the concerns over genetically-modified products and the implications for follow-on advancements within biotechnology by using Monsanto as a case study. The article finds that patent policies similar to those within the United States severely restrict competition and stifle innovation in not only the agricultural sector but also within research and humanitarian projects. …

Skill Ontogeny Among Tsimane Forager-Horticulturalists, Eric Schniter, Michael Gurven, Hillard Kaplan, Nathaniel Wilcox, Paul Hooper

ESI Working Papers

No abstract provided.

Experimenting With Behavior Based Pricing, Zuzana Brokesova, Cary Deck, Jana Peliova

ESI Working Papers

Many purchases of differentiated goods are repeated, giving sellers the opportunity to engage in price discrimination based upon the shopper’s previous behavior by either offering loyalty discounts to repeat buyers or introductory rates to new customers. Recent theoretical work suggests that loyalty discounts are likely to be implemented when customer preferences are not stationary and sellers can pre-commit to prices for repeat buyers, but otherwise repeat buyers can be expected to pay the same or more than new buyers. This paper reports the results of a series of controlled laboratory experiments designed to empirically test the impact of these factors …

People Do Not Discount Heavily In Strategic Settings, But They Believe Others Do, Cary Deck, Salar Jahedi

ESI Working Papers

Several studies have shown that people greatly discount future bene ts and costs. However, most of the direct laboratory evidence of this phenomenon has focused on individual choice experiments. This paper investigates the degree to which the timing of payments a ects behavior in four commonly studies strategic settings: a Prisoner's Dilemma game, a Stag-Hunt game, a First Price Auction and a Second Price Auction. In all four settings, a two week delay in payo s has a comparable e ect to a 20% reduc- tion in current payo s. A follow-up study suggests that it is an individual's strategic …

Single- And Double-Elimination All-Pay Tournaments, Cary Deck, Erik O. Kimbrough

ESI Working Papers

Tournaments consisting of iterative matches are a common mechanism for determining how to allocate a prize. While participants are focused on their own outcomes, tournament organizers often have objectives such as maximizing the total investment or effort by the participants over the course of the tournament. For this reason it is important for organizers to understand the behavioral as well as the theoretical properties of different tournament structures. Given that laboratory experiments have consistently found high levels of overbidding in contests, one might suspect that double-elimination tournaments would generate substantially more total investment than single-elimination tournaments despite the two types …

Accounting Standards And Financial Market Stability: An Experimental Examination, Shengle Lin, Glenn Pfeiffer, David Porter

ESI Working Papers

We examine the effect on asset mispricing of different accounting methods in an experimental asset market characterized by bubbles and crashes. In particular, we study three alternative asset value reporting treatments: (1) Fair Value (also known as Mark-to-Market – M2M), (2) Historical Cost (HC) and (3) Marked to Fundamental Value (M2F). In addition, each of these treatments is replicated in two different financial leverage conditions. In the first condition (No Loan) traders must purchase assets from their available cash balances without the option of borrowing. In the second condition, (Loan), traders are given the option of taking out loans based …

Rust-Belt Recovery: The Cleveland Model As Economic Development In An Age Of Economic Stagnation And Climate Change, Ross Lenihan

Pepperdine Policy Review

The economic outlook of the United States is dire. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, poverty has not lessened even as U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has rebounded following the Great Recession. This paper explores the development potential of joint worker-community cooperative structures during the current economic downturn by analyzing the “Cleveland model,” a network of worker-owned cooperatives supported by local education/healthcare "anchor" institutions and financed and organized by a non-profit community development corporation. I find that while worker and community-owned enterprises hold significant promise for both workers and communities in times of economic stagnation and ecological danger, existing market …

Short-Run Price Dynamics In Guatemala, Miguel R. Martinez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

An equation is estimated to model short-run price dynamics for Guatemala using ordinary least squares. The data range from 1960 to 2012. Due to the lack of complete data for interest rates, fitted values for the deposit rate are calculated using the discount rate. The aim is to measure how the consumer price index responds to changes in monetary base, real output, interest rates and exchange rates. All coefficients have their expected signs. With the exception of real output, the coefficients are found to be statistically significant at a 5% confidence level.

A Tractable Analysis Of Contagious Equilibria, Gabriele Camera, Alessandro Gioffré

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

This paper studies contagious equilibrium in infinitely repeated matching games. The innovation is to identify a key statistic of contagious punishment that, used together with a recursive formulation, generates tractable closed-form expressions for continuation payoffs, off equilibrium. This allows a transparent characterization of the dynamic incentives created by contagious punishment schemes.

Uniqueness Of Equilibrium In Directed Search Models, Jaehong Kim, Gabriele Camera

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

We study a decentralized trading model as in [7], where a finite number of heterogeneous capacity-constrained sellers compete for a finite number of homogeneous buyers, by posting prices. This "directed search" model is known to admit symmetric equilibria; yet, uniqueness has proved elusive. This study makes two contributions: a substantive contribution is to establish uniqueness of symmetric equilibrium; a methodological contribution is to develop a tool based on directional derivatives to characterize equilibrium.