Economic Theory Commons^™

Chapter Five, Money - Earlier Drafts, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes:

• Exchange, money and price — Shaikh, Anwar, PhD. Draft dated May 17, 2010, with an earlier date of March 22, 2009 also recorded on the document. Unpublished manuscript.
• Exchange, money and price — Shaikh, Anwar, PhD. Outline dated May 14, 2010, with an earlier date of March 22, 2009 also recorded on the document. Unpublished outline.
• Long waves: Theories and chronologies — Shaikh, Anwar, PhD. Undated. Unpublished handwritten notes and chronological table.
• Notes on long waves and great depressions — Shaikh, Anwar, PhD. Undated. Unpublished research notes.
• General points on Marx's theory of money — Shaikh, Anwar, …

Visibility Of Contributions And Cost Of Information: An Experiment On Public Goods, Anya Savikhin, Roman M. Sheremeta

ESI Working Papers

We experimentally investigate the impact of visibility of information about contributors on contributions in the public goods game. We systematically consider several treatments that are similar to a wide range of situations in practice. First, we vary the cost of viewing identifiable information about contributors. Second, we vary recognizing all, top or bottom contributors. We find that recognizing all contributors significantly increases contributions relative to the baseline. Recognizing only the top contributors is not significantly different from not recognizing contributors, but recognizing only the bottom contributors is as effective as recognizing all contributors. When viewing information about contributors is costly, …

Fight Or Flight? Defending Against Sequential Attacks In The Game Of Siege, Cary Deck, Roman M. Sheremeta

ESI Working Papers

This paper examines theory and behavior in a two-player game of siege, sequential attack and defense. The attacker’s objective is to successfully win at least one battle while the defender’s objective is to win every battle. Theoretically, the defender either folds immediately or, if his valuation is sufficiently high and the number of battles is sufficiently small, then he has a constant incentive to fight in each battle. Attackers respond to defense with diminishing assaults over time. Consistent with theoretical predictions, our experimental results indicate that the probability of successful defense increases in the defenders valuation and it decreases in …

Affecting Policy By Manipulating Prediction Markets: Experimental Evidence, Cary Deck, Shengle Lin, David Porter

ESI Working Papers

Documented results indicate prediction markets effectively aggregate information and form accurate predictions. This has led to a proliferation of markets predicting everything from the results of elections to a company’s sales to movie box office receipts. Recent research suggests prediction markets are robust to manipulation attacks and resulting market outcomes improve forecast accuracy. However, we present evidence from the lab indicating that single‐minded, well‐funded manipulators can in fact destroy a prediction market’s ability to aggregate informative prices and mislead those who are making forecasts based upon market predictions. However, we find that manipulators primarily influence market trades meaning outstanding bids …

Can Markets Save Lives? An Experimental Investigation Of A Market For Organ Donations, Cary Deck, Erik O. Kimbrough

ESI Working Papers

Many people die while waiting for organ transplants even though the number of usable organs is far larger than the number needed for transplant. Governments have devised many policies aimed at increasing available transplant organs with variable success. However, with few exceptions, policy makers are reluctant to establish markets for organs despite the potential for mutually beneficial exchanges. We ask whether organ markets could save lives. Controlled laboratory methods are ideal for this inquiry because human lives would be involved when implementing field trials. Our results suggest that markets can increase the supply of organs available for transplant, but that …

Personality And The Consistency Of Risk Taking Behavior: Experimental Evidence, Cary Deck, Jungmin Lee, Javier Reyes

ESI Working Papers

Researchers have found that an individual’s risk attitude is not stable across elicitation methods. Results reported by Deck et al. (2009) suggest that personality may help explain the apparent inconsistency, offering support to Borghans et al.’s (2008) argument that economists should consider a multi‐domain approach to measuring risk attitudes. This paper uses laboratory methods to compare risk attitudes as measured by the Holt and Laury (2002) procedure under two different frames. We find that, as in Deck et al. (2009), one’s willingness to take financial risks (as measured by Weber et al. 2002) significantly affects behavior; however the effect is …

Perfect And Imperfect Real-Time Monitoring In A Minimum-Effort Game, Cary Deck, Nikos Nikiforakis

ESI Working Papers

This paper presents the results from a minimum-effort game in which individuals can observe the choices of others in real time. We find that under perfect monitoring almost all groups coordinate at the payoff-dominant equilibrium. However, when individuals can only observe the actions of their immediate neighbors in a circle network, monitoring improves neither coordination nor efficiency relative to a baseline treatment without real-time monitoring. We argue that the inefficiency of imperfect monitoring is due to information uncertainty, that is, uncertainty about the interpretation of the information available regarding the actions of others.

Price Increasing Competition? Experimental Evidence, Cary Deck, Jingping Gu

ESI Working Papers

Economic intuition suggests that increased competition generates lower prices. However, recent theoretical work shows that a monopolist may charge a lower price than a firm facing a competitor selling a differentiated product. The direction of the price change when competition is introduced is dependent upon the joint distribution of buyer values for the two products. We explore this relationship using controlled laboratory experiments. Our results indicate that the distribution of buyer values does affect prices in a manner consistent with the theoretical predictions, although price increasing competition is rare due in part to overly intense competition regardless of the distribution …

The Attack And Defense Of Weakest-Link Networks, Dan Kovenock, Brian Roberson, Roman M. Sheremeta

ESI Working Papers

This paper experimentally examines behavior in a two-player game of attack and defense of a weakest-link network of targets, in which the attacker‟s objective is to successfully attack at least one target and the defender‟s objective is diametrically opposed. We apply two benchmark contest success functions (CSFs): the auction CSF and the lottery CSF. Consistent with the theoretical prediction, under the auction CSF, attackers utilize a stochastic “guerilla warfare” strategy — in which a single random target is attacked — more than 80% of the time. Under the lottery CSF, attackers utilize the stochastic guerilla warfare strategy almost 45% of …

Durability, Re-Trading And Market Performance, John Dickhaut, Shengle Lin, David Porter, Vernon Smith

ESI Working Papers

Key differential structural characteristics of environments studied in previous market experiments have documented large divergences in their observed performance, particularly discrepancies in their convergence to expected equilibrium outcomes. We investigate why this should be so.

Tracking Berle’S Footsteps: The Trail Of The Modern Corporation’S Last Chapter, William W. Bratton, Michael L. Wachter

Seattle University Law Review

Readers game enough to work through all three hundred pages of The Modern Corporation and Private Property looking for insights on corporate law today encounter two, apparently contradictory, lines of thought. One line, set out in Books II and III, resonates comfortably with today’s shareholder-centered corporate legal theory. Here the book teaches that even as ownership and control have separated, managers should function as trustees for the shareholders and so should exercise their wide-ranging powers for the shareholders’ benefit. The other line of thought emerges in Books I and IV, where The Modern Corporation encases this shareholder trust model in …

Rethinking The Separation Of Ownership From Management In American History, Kenneth Lipartito, Yumiko Morii

Seattle University Law Review

In <em>The Modern Corporation and Private Property</em>, Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means would use AT&T as a prime example of what they saw as a dangerous new trend, the replacement of ownership-based capitalism with giant corporations controlled by a small group of propertyless managers. Indeed, AT&T became Berle and Means’ favorite example. . . . As we shall see, however, the claim that AT&T was a leading example of the separation of ownership from management is incomplete. More importantly, the common interpretation of Berle and Means’ work is mistaken, placing the emphasis incorrectly on the number of shareholders and reading …

Berle’S Vision Beyond Shareholder Interests: Why Investment Bankers Should Have (Some) Personal Liability, Claire Hill, Richard Painter

Seattle University Law Review

This essay, published in a symposium on the work of Adolf Berle, approaches the Berle-Dodd debate from the perspective that corporate managers have responsibilities beyond pursuing the interests of shareholders. Stock based executive compensation, designed to align managers’ interests with those of shareholders, has, in the investment banking industry in particular, failed to avert, and may have caused, managers (in this case, bankers) to take excessive risks that in the present financial crisis inflicted great damage on creditors and on society as a whole. We describe here the broad outlines of a proposal that we will discuss in future publications …

Enumerating Old Themes? Berle’S Concept Of Ownership And The Historical Development Of English Company Law In Context, Lorraine E. Talbot

Seattle University Law Review

This paper offers some tentative suggestions as to why Berle’s work has been read and interpreted so selectively in the United Kingdom. I suggest that this must be partly attributable to the historical developments in English company law that entrenched the notion of shareholder ownership claims. Specifically, unincorporated associations’ normative values—that members are owners and there is no distinction between small organizations with no share dispersal and large organizations with wide share dispersal—have a continuing influence on this entrenched notion of shareholder ownership claims. First, I provide an overview of the origins of English company law. Next, I address how …