Economic Theory Commons^™

An Experimental Investigation Of Colonel Blotto Games, Subhasish M. Chowdhury, Dan Kovenock, Roman M. Sheremeta

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

This article examines behavior in the two-player, constant-sum Colonel Blotto game with asymmetric resources in which players maximize the expected number of battlefields won. The experimental results support the main qualitative predictions of the theory. In the auction treatment, where winning a battlefield is deterministic, disadvantaged players use a 'guerilla warfare' strategy that stochastically allocates zero resources to a subset of battlefields. Advantaged players employ a 'stochastic complete coverage' strategy, allocating random, but positive, resource levels across the battlefields. In the lottery treatment, where winning a battlefield is probabilistic, both players divide their resources equally across all battlefields. However, we …

Commodity Prices (Chapter 10), Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes:

• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Ch 10 commodity prices / industrial prices (Unpublished manuscript notes) (p. 1).
• Shaikh, A. (2011, January 11). Fixcapesample.xmcd (Unpublished manuscript notes) (p. 2).
• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Production function notes.docx (Unpublished manuscript notes) (p. 4).
• Shaikh, A. (2010, August 28). Petri reswitching.xmcd (Unpublished manuscript notes) (p. 22).
• Shaikh, A. (2013, November 24). Price and value aggregates (Unpublished manuscript notes) (p. 26).
• Shaikh, A. (2009, January 6). Three lines of inquiry w/r linear std prices (Unpublished manuscript notes) (p. 27).
• Shaikh, A. (2010, January 20). Subdominant eigenvalues of a (Unpublished manuscript notes) (p. 28).
• Shaikh, A. …

Eminent Economist Galleys, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes:

• Shaikh, A. (2013). Order in and through disorder: the invisible hand as a turbulent regulator (Unpublished manuscript) (p. 2).
• Shaikh, A. (2013). No question market (Handwritten note) (p. 2).
• Shaikh, A. (2013). Up (Handwritten note) (p. 4).
• Shaikh, A. (2013). S(?) (Handwritten note) (p. 5).
• Shaikh, A. (2013). And more recently of rob johnson and the institute for new economic thinking (inet) (Handwritten note) (p. 7).
• Shaikh, A. (2013). Le (Handwritten note) (p. 9).
• Shaikh, A. (2013). E (Handwritten note) (p. 9).
• Becker, G. S. (1962). Irrational behavior and economic theory. Journal of Political Economy, …

An Empirical Analysis Of The Migratory Flows To The United States, Felipe Isaias Galan Uribe

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Migration is generally regarded as an investment decision. Costs and gains from relocating are employed to explain migratory flows. Labor market conditions are important in defining such gains and costs. Labor markets are affected by regulatory burdens. This study is an analysis the effect of labor markets restrictiveness on migrations. Data from Doing Business are employed to describe the labor market situation in 168 countries during the year 2010. The United States is employed as benchmark of an open economy attracting migrants. Outcomes are somewhat ambiguous. Sime regulations are found to lead to more migration, while other actually help to …

How Universal Is The Big Five? Testing The Five-Factor Model Of Personality Variation Among Forager-Farmers In The Bolivian Amazon, Michael Gurven, Christopher Von Rueden, Maxim Massenkoff, Hillard Kaplan, Marino Lero Vie

ESI Publications

The five-factor model (FFM) of personality variation has been replicated across a range of human societies, suggesting the FFM is a human universal. However, most studies of the FFM have been restricted to literate, urban populations, which are uncharacteristic of the majority of human evolutionary history. We present the first test of the FFM in a largely illiterate, indigenous society. Tsimane forager–horticulturalist men and women of Bolivia (n = 632) completed a translation of the 44-item Big Five Inventory (Benet-Martínez & John, 1998), a widely used metric of the FFM. We failed to find robust support for the FFM, based …

Eco104 Ricardo Ii Ltv + Empirical, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection contains:

• Profit/wage ratios and fixed capital models, including labor theory of value calculations [Tables and figures]. (n.d.).

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (2013, October 4). Ricardo on rent & FROP [Handwritten notes for GECO 104].

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (n.d.). Ricardo on fiscal policy and taxes (Ricardian equivalence), including Say’s law [Handwritten notes].

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (n.d.). Analytical structure of classical theory of price [Handwritten notes].

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (2013, September 19). Next: Ricardo example—data—Schwartz—IO—reprise of Smith [Handwritten notes].

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (2008, September 16). Lecture III: Ricardo on value & price [Handwritten notes for …

Against Endowment Theory: Experimental Economics And Legal Scholarship, Greg Klass, Kathryn Zeiler

Faculty Scholarship

Endowment theory holds the mere ownership of a thing causes people to assign greater value to it than they otherwise would. The theory entered legal scholarship in the early 1990s and quickly eclipsed other accounts of how ownership affects valuation. Today, appeals to a generic “endowment effect” can be found throughout the legal literature. More recent experimental results, however, suggest that the empirical evidence for endowment theory is weak at best. When the procedures used in laboratory experiments are altered to rule out alternative explanations, the “endowment effect” disappears. This and other recent evidence suggest that mere ownership does not …

When Parity Promotes Peace: Resolving Conflict Between Asymmetric Agents, Erik O. Kimbrough, Roman M. Sheremeta, Timothy W. Shields

ESI Working Papers

Due to the high costs of conflict both in theory and practice, we examine and experimentally test the conditions under which conflict between asymmetric agents can be resolved. We model conflict as a two-agent rent-seeking contest for an indivisible prize. Before conflict arises, both agents may agree to allocate the prize by fair coin flip to avoid the costs of conflict. The model predicts that “parity promotes peace”: in the pure-strategy equilibrium, agents with relatively symmetric conflict capabilities agree to resolve the conflict by using a random device; however, with sufficiently asymmetric capabilities, conflicts are unavoidable because the stronger agent …

Cheap Talk With Two Audiences: An Experiment, Mikhail Drugov, Roberto Hérnan-Gonzalez, Praveen Kujal, Marta Troya Martinez

ESI Working Papers

In this paper we experimentally test strategic information transmission between one informed and two uninformed agents in a cheap-talk game. We find evidence of the "disciplining" effect of public communication as compared to private; however, it is much weaker than predicted by the theory. Adding a second receiver naturally increases the complexity of strategic thinking when communication is public. Using the level-k model, we exploit the within subject design to show how individuals decrease their level-k in public communication. Surprisingly, we find that individuals become more sophisticated when they communicate privately with two receivers rather than one.

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

ESI Working Papers

Religious identity affects preferences and can consequently affect policy. We propose two mechanisms through which a ruler's religious identity can affect public good provision: i) greater provision of goods in regions where more subjects are the ruler's co-religionists, and ii) lower provision of goods where private markets provide a substitute to the ruler's co-religionists. Empirically, identifying the causal effect of religious identity on policy is often impossible, since the religious identity of rulers rarely changes over time and place. We address this problem by exploiting the variation in the religion of rulers in the Indian Princely States in the early …

Do Prediction Markets Aid Defenders In A Weak‐Link Contest?, Cary Deck, Li Hao, David Porter

ESI Working Papers

Laboratory experiments have demonstrated that prediction market prices weakly aggregate the disparate information of the traders about states (moves) of nature. However, in many practical applications one might want to predict the move of a strategic participant. This is particularly important in aggressor‐defender contests. This paper reports a set of such experiments where the defender may have the advantage of observing a prediction market on the aggressor’s action. The results of the experiments indicate that: the use of prediction markets does not increase the defender’s win rate; prediction markets contain reliable information regarding aggressors’ decisions, namely excess bid information, that …

Recalibrational Emotions And The Regulation Of Trust-Based Behaviors, Eric Schniter, Timothy W. Shields

ESI Working Papers

Though individuals differ in the degree to which they are predisposed to trust or act trustworthy, we theorize that trust-based behaviors are universally determined by the calibration of conflicting short- and long-sighted behavior regulation programs, and that these programs are calibrated by emotions experienced personally and interpersonally. In this chapter we review both the main-stream and evolutionary theories of emotions that philosophers, psychologists, and behavioral economists have based their work on and which can inform our understanding of trust-based behavior regulation. The standard paradigm for understanding emotions is based on mapping their positive and negative affect valence. While Valence Models …

Commitment Problems In Conflict Resolution, Erik O. Kimbrough, Jared Rubin, Roman M. Sheremeta, Timothy W. Shields

ESI Working Papers

Commitment problems are inherent to non-binding conflict resolution mechanisms, since an unsatisfied party can ignore the resolution and initiate conflict. We provide experimental evidence suggesting that even in the absence of binding contractual agreements individuals often avoid conflict by committing to the outcome of a conflict resolution mechanism. Commitment problems are mitigated to a greater extent for groups who opt-in to the conflict resolution mechanism, but only when opting-in is costly. Although conflict rates are higher when opting-in is costly than when it is free or exogenously imposed, commitment problems are greatly reduced amongst those groups who choose to opt-in.

The Impact Of Competition On Prices With Numerous Firms, Xavier Gabaix, David Laibson, Deyuan Li, Hongyi Li

ESI Working Papers

We use extreme value theory (EVT) to develop insights about price theory. Our analysis reveals detail-independent equilibrium properties that characterize a large family of models. We derive a formula relating equilibrium prices to the level of competition. When the number of rms is large, markups are proportional to 1= (nF' [F^-1 (1- 1/n)], where F is the random utility noise distribution and n is the number of rms. This implies prices are pinned down by the tail properties of the noise distribution and that prices are independent of many other institutional details. The elasticity of the markup with respect to …

Prediction Markets In The Laboratory, Cary Deck, David Porter

ESI Working Papers

"The idea that there is wisdom from the collective has been forcefully described in “The Wisdom of the Crowds” by James Surowiecki, who argues that the aggregation of information in groups results in better decisions than those that are afforded by any single member of the group. Markets, like opinion polls, are one mechanism for aggregating disparate pieces of information. The aggregation properties of prices were first noted by Hayek (1945) and were formally examined by Muth (1961). In particular, Hayek argues that market prices serve the purpose of sharing and coordinating local and personal knowledge, while Muth shows that …

What's Left Of Micro, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes.

• Shaikh, A. (2013, November 10). Comments [Unpublished handwritten manuscript].

• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Disagreements [Unpublished handwritten manuscript].

• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Rethinking micro [Unpublished handwritten manuscript].

• Shaikh, A. (2013, November 10). Ceylon bicycle repair shop: Rethinking micro (UMass/NSSR student conference) [Unpublished handwritten manuscript].

• Shaikh, A. (2009, December 3). What’s left of microeconomics: Lecture outline [Unpublished manuscript].

• Guerrien, B. (2002, March 15). Is there anything worth keeping in standard microeconomics? Post-Autistic Economics Review, (12), Article 1. Post-Autistic Economics Network.

• Harcourt, G. C. (2002, May 2). Comment on Bernard Guerrien’s essay. Post-Autistic Economics …

Marx On Value, Form Of Value, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes.

• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Marx on value, form of value [Handwritten cover note].

• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Marx on value [Typed manuscript].

• Shaikh, A. (2013, October 31). L eco 3101 [Unpublished handwritten notes].

• Shaikh, A. (2013, October 24). Hist. foundations I [Unpublished handwritten notes].

• Shaikh, A. (2013, November 6). Hist of thought [Unpublished handwritten notes].

• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Notes on contradiction, exchange, and money [Unpublished handwritten notes].

• Shaikh, A. (2013, October 24). Hist found. I [Unpublished handwritten notes].

• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Lecture 2: Exchange, money and price [Typed manuscript with handwritten …

Women's Mobilization In Latin America: A Case Study Of Venezuela, Brianna Russell

Master's Theses

Abstract

I examine the following elements in regards to women’s mobilization in Latin America and Venezuela from the late 1950s to the present: (a) the influence of the state and economy on times when women mobilized (b) class division within the movement (c) women’s demands during different time periods (d) the ways in which women were successful in working towards gender equality. This thesis reviews the literature on women’s mobilization in Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century. I find that women mobilized across class lines with the masses to end dictatorships. Women demobilized during transitions to …

Modernization, Sexual Risk-Taking, And Gynecological Morbidity Among Bolivian Forager-Horticulturalists, Jonathan Stieglitz, Aaron D. Blackwell, Raúl Quispe Gutierrez, Edhitt Cortez Linares, Michael Gurven, Hillard Kaplan

ESI Publications

Sexual risk-taking and reproductive morbidity are common among rapidly modernizing populations with little material wealth, limited schooling, minimal access to modern contraception and healthcare, and gendered inequalities in resource access that limit female autonomy in cohabiting relationships. Few studies have examined how modernization influences sexual risk-taking and reproductive health early in demographic transition. Tsimane are a natural fertility population of Bolivian forager-farmers; they are not urbanized, reside in small-scale villages, and lack public health infrastructure. We test whether modernization is associated with greater sexual risk-taking, report prevalence of gynecological morbidity (GM), and test whether modernization, sexual risk-taking and parity are …

The Structure Of Strategy-Proof Random Social Choice Functions Over Product Domains And Lexicographically Separable Preferences, Shurojit Chatterji, Souvik Roy, Arunava Sen

Research Collection School Of Economics

We characterize the class of dominant-strategy incentive-compatible (or strategy-proof) random social choice functions in the standard multi-dimensional voting model where voter preferences over the various dimensions (or components) are lexicographically separable. We show that these social choice functions (which we call generalized random dictatorships) are induced by probability distributions on voter sequences of length equal to the number of components. They induce a fixed probability distribution on the product set of voter peaks. The marginal probability distribution over every component is a random dictatorship. Our results generalize the classic random dictatorship result in Gibbard (1977) and the decomposability results for …