Other Economics Commons^™

Cardiovascular Disease And Type 2 Diabetes In Evolutionary Perspective: A Critical Role For Helminths?, Michael D. Gurven, Benjamin C. Trumble, Jonathan Stieglitz, Aaron D. Blackwell, David E. Michalik, Caleb E. Finch, Hillard Kaplan

ESI Publications

Heart disease and type 2 diabetes are commonly believed to be rare among contemporary subsistencelevel human populations, and by extension prehistoric populations. Although some caveats remain, evidence shows these diseases to be unusual among well-studied hunter-gatherers and other subsistence populations with minimal access to healthcare. Here we expand on a relatively new proposal for why these and other populations may not show major signs of these diseases. Chronic infections, especially helminths, may offer protection against heart disease and diabetes through direct and indirect pathways. As part of a strategy to insure their own survival and reproduction, helminths exert multiple cardio-protective …

Dual Process Utility Theory: A Model Of Decisions Under Risk And Over Time, Mark Schneider

ESI Working Papers

The Discounted Expected Utility model has been a major workhorse for analyzing individual behavior for over half a century. However, it cannot account for evidence that risk interacts with time preference, that time interacts with risk preference, that many people are averse to timing risk and do not discount the future exponentially, that discounting depends on the magnitude of outcomes, that risk preferences are not time preferences, and that risk and time preferences are correlated with cognitive ability. Here we address these issues in a decision model based on the interaction of an affective and a reflective valuation process. The …

Multi-Battle Contests: An Experimental Study, Shakun D. Mago, Roman M. Sheremeta

ESI Working Papers

We examine behavior of subjects in simultaneous and sequential multi-battle contests, where each individual battle is modeled as an all-pay auction with complete information. In simultaneous best-of-three contests, subjects are predicted to make positive bids in all three battles, but we find that subjects often make positive bids in only two battles. In sequential contests, theory predicts sizable bids in the first battle and no bids in the subsequent battles. Contrary to this prediction, subjects significantly underbid in the first battle and overbid in subsequent battles. Consequently, instead of always ending in the second battle, contests often proceeds to the …

An Experimental Investigation Of Simultaneous Multi-Battle Contests With Complementarities, Cary Deck, Sudipta Sarangi, Matt Wiser

ESI Publications

This paper reports the results of laboratory experiments that are designed to test theoretical predictions in a multi-battle contest with value complementarities among the battles. The specific setting is a game of Hex where control of each region is determined by a Tullock contest and the overall winner is determined by the combination of claimed regions. We find that in a game with only a few regions, aggregate behavior across regions is largely consistent with the theoretical predictions. However, examining individual level behavior suggests that bidders are not behaving in accordance with the model, but often pursue specific winning combinations. …

Impulsive Behavior In Competition: Testing Theories Of Overbidding In Rent-Seeking Contests, Roman M. Sheremeta

ESI Working Papers

Researchers have proposed various theories to explain overbidding in rent-seeking contents, including mistakes, systematic biases, the utility of winning, and relative payoff maximization. Through an eight-part experiment, we test and find significant support for the existing theories. Also, we discover some new explanations based on cognitive ability and impulsive behavior. Out of all explanations examined, we find that impulsivity is the most important factor explaining overbidding in contests.

University Rankings: Evidence And A Conceptual Framework, Jonathan G.S. Koppell, Jacob Fowles, H. George Frederickson

Publications from President Jonathan G.S. Koppell

University ranking has high public visibility, the ranking business has flourished, and institutions of higher education have not been able to ignore it. This study of university ranking presents general considerations of ranking and institutional responses to it, particularly considering reactions to ranking, ranking as a self-fulfilling prophecy, and ranking as a means of transforming qualities into quantities. The authors present a conceptual framework of university ranking based on three propositions and carry out a descriptive statistical analysis of U.S. and international ranking data to evaluate those propositions. The first proposition of university ranking is that ranking systems are demarcated …

Endogenous Market Formation And Monetary Trade: An Experiment, Gabriele Camera, Dror Goldberg, Avi Weiss

ESI Working Papers

The theory of money assumes decentralized bilateral exchange and excludes centralized multilateral exchange. However, endogenizing the exchange process is critical for understanding the conditions that support the use of money. We develop a “travelling game” to study the spontaneous emergence of decentralized and centralized exchange, theoretically and experimentally. Players located on separate “islands” can either trade locally, or pay a cost to trade elsewhere, so decentralized and centralized markets can both emerge in equilibrium. The latter maximize trade meetings and are socially efficient; the former minimize trade costs through the use of money. In the laboratory, centralized exchange more frequently …

Do Economic Inequalities Affect Long-Run Cooperation?, Gabriele Camera, Cary Deck, David Porter

ESI Working Papers

Does inequality affect a group’s cohesion and ability to prosper? Participants in laboratory economies played an indefinite sequence of helping games in random, anonymous pairs. A coin flip determined donor and recipient roles in each pair. This random shock ensured equality of opportunity but not of results, because earnings depended on realized shocks. We manipulated the ability to condition choices on this uncontrollable inequality source. In all treatments, uncertain ending supports multiple Pareto-ranked equilibria, including full cooperation. Theoretically, inequalities do not alter the incentives’ structure. Empirically, inequality disclosures altered conduct, weakened norms of mutual support and reduced efficiency.

Focality And Asymmetry In Multi-Battle Contests, Subhashish M. Chowdhury, Dan Kovenock, David Rojo Arjona, Nathaniel Wilcox

ESI Working Papers

This article examines behavior in two-person constant-sum Colonel Blotto games in which each player maximizes the expected total value of the battlefields won. A lottery contest success function is employed in each battlefield. Recent experimental research on such games provides only partial support for Nash equilibrium behavior. We hypothesize that the salience of battlefields affects strategic behavior (the salient target hypothesis). We present a controlled test of this hypothesis – against Nash predictions – when the sources of salience come from certain asymmetries in either battlefield values or labels (as in Schelling (1960)). In both cases, subjects over-allocate the resource …

An Epigenetic Clock Analysis Of Race/Ethnicity, Sex, And Coronary Heart Disease, Steve Horvath, Michael Gurven, Morgan E. Levine, Benjamin C. Trumble, Hillard Kaplan, Hooman Allayee, Beate R. Ritz, Brian Chen, Ake T. Lu, Tammy M. Rickabaugh, Beth D. Jamieson, Dianjianyi Sun, Shengxu Li, Wei Chen, Lluis Quintana-Murci, Maud Fagny, Michael S. Kobor, Philip S. Tsao, Alexander P. Reiner, Kerstin L. Edlefsen, Devin Absher, Themistocles L. Assimes

ESI Publications

Background: Epigenetic biomarkers of aging (the “epigenetic clock”) have the potential to address puzzling findings surrounding mortality rates and incidence of cardio-metabolic disease such as: (1) women consistently exhibiting lower mortality than men despite having higher levels of morbidity; (2) racial/ethnic groups having different mortality rates even after adjusting for socioeconomic differences; (3) the black/white mortality cross-over effect in late adulthood; and (4) Hispanics in the United States having a longer life expectancy than Caucasians despite having a higher burden of traditional cardio-metabolic risk factors.

Results: We analyzed blood, saliva, and brain samples from seven different racial/ethnic groups. …

The Influence Of The Electric Supply Industry On Economic Growth In Less Developed Countries, Edward Richard Bee

Dissertations

This study measures the impact that electrical outages have on manufacturing production in 135 less developed countries using stochastic frontier analysis and data from World Bank’s Investment Climate surveys. Outages of electricity, for firms with and without backup power sources, are the most frequently cited constraint on manufacturing growth in these surveys.

Outages are shown to reduce output below the production frontier by almost five percent in Africa and by a lower percentage in South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. Production response to outages is quadratic in form. Outages also increase labor cost, reduce exports …

Associations Between Male Testosterone And Immune Function In A Pathogenically Stressed Forager-Horticultural Population, Benjamin C. Trumble, Aaron D. Blackwell, Jonathan Stieglitz, Melissa Emery Thompson, Ivan Maldonado Suarez, Hillard Kaplan, Michael Gurven

ESI Publications

Objectives—Despite well-known fitness advantages to males who produce and maintain high endogenous testosterone levels, such phenotypes may be costly if testosterone-mediated investment in reproductive effort trade-off against investment in somatic maintenance. Previous studies of androgen-mediated trade-offs in human immune function find mixed results, in part because most studies either focus on a few indicators of immunity, are confounded by phenotypic correlation, or are observational. Here the association between male endogenous testosterone and 13 circulating cytokines are examined before and after ex vivo antigen stimulation with phytohaemagglutinin (PHA) and lipopolysaccharides (LPS) in a high pathogen population of Bolivian forager-horticulturalists.

Materials …

Multiple Openings And Competitiveness Of Forward Markets: Experimental Evidence, José Luis Ferreira, Praveen Kujal, Stephen Rassenti

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

We test the competition enhancing effect of selling forward in experimental Cournot duopoly and quadropoly with multiple forward markets. We find that two forward periods yields competitive outcomes and that the results are very close to the predicted theoretical results for quantity setting duopolies and quadropolies. Our experiments lend strong support to the hypothesis that forward markets are competition enhancing. We then test a new market that allows for endogenously determined indefinitely many forward periods that only close when sellers coordinate on selling a zero amount in a forward market. We find that the outcomes under an endogenous close rule …

Indirect Reciprocity, Resource Sharing, And Environmental Risk: Evidence From Field Experiments In Siberia, E. Lance Howe, James J. Murphy, Drew Gerkey, Colin Thor West

ESI Publications

Integrating information from existing research, qualitative ethnographic interviews, and participant observation, we designed a field experiment that introduces idiosyncratic environmental risk and a voluntary sharing decision into a standard public goods game. Conducted with subsistence resource users in rural villages on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Northeast Siberia, we find evidence consistent with a model of indirect reciprocity and local social norms of helping the needy. When participants are allowed to develop reputations in the experiments, as is the case in most small-scale societies, we find that sharing is increasingly directed toward individuals experiencing hardship, good reputations increase aid, and the …

Health Costs Of Reproduction Are Minimal Despite High Fertility, Mortality And Subsistence Lifestyle, Michael Gurven, Megan Costa, Ben Trumble, Jonathan Stieglitz, Bret Beheim, Daniel Eid Rodriguez, Paul L. Hooper, Hillard Kaplan

ESI Publications

Women exhibit greater morbidity than men despite higher life expectancy. An evolutionary life history framework predicts that energy invested in reproduction trades-off against investments in maintenance and survival. Direct costs of reproduction may therefore contribute to higher morbidity, especially for women given their greater direct energetic contributions to reproduction. We explore multiple indicators of somatic condition among Tsimane forager-horticulturalist women (Total Fertility Rate = 9.1; n = 592 aged 15–44 years, n = 277 aged 45+). We test whether cumulative live births and the pace of reproduction are associated with nutritional status and immune function using longitudinal data spanning 10 …

John Nash: A Personal Remembrance (Introduction To The John Forbes Nash Jr. Memorial Special Issue), Vernon Smith

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

In January of 2011, three years after his 80th birthday, Games and Economic Behavior published a special issue to honor John Nash. In their introductory note, the editors, Avinash Dixit, Ehud Kalai and Stephen Morris wrote: “We are delighted to have the privilege of coordinating this expression of the whole profession's admiration and appreciation of John Nash and his work, and look forward to a repeat in ten or even twenty years' time.”

This wish was sadly interrupted by tragedy. On their way back from the ceremony awarding John the Abel Prize in mathematics, John and his wife Alicia were …

High Resting Metabolic Rate Among Amazonian Forager-Horticulturalists Experiencing High Pathogen Burden, Michael Gurven, Benjamin C. Trumble, Jonathan Stieglitz, Gandhi Yetish, Daniel Cummings, Aaron D. Blackwell, Bret Beheim, Hillard Kaplan, Herman Pontzer

ESI Publications

Objectives—Resting metabolic rate (RMR) reflects energetic costs of homeostasis and accounts for 60-75% of total energy expenditure (TEE). Lean mass and physical activity account for much RMR variability, but the impact of prolonged immune activation from infection on human RMR is unclear in naturalistic settings. We evaluate the effects of infection on mass-corrected RMR among Bolivian forager-horticulturalists, and assess whether RMR declines more slowly with age than in hygienic sedentary populations, as might be expected if older adults experience high pathogen burden.

Materials and Methods—RMR was measured by indirect calorimetry (Fitmate MED, Cosmed) in 1,300 adults aged 20-90 …

The 2016 Nebraska Manufacturing Report, Mitch Herian, Eric Thomspon

Bureau of Business Research Publications

The purpose of this report is to provide an economic snapshot of the Nebraska manufacturing industry. In particular, the report is designed to present contributions of manufacturing to the state economy, recent trends in Nebraska manufacturing, and considerations for the future of Nebraska manufacturing. The information contained within the report will help policy makers and stakeholders better understand the current state of manufacturing in the state, particularly in relation to recent demographic and economic trends in Nebraska and the United States. The report finds that the manufacturing sector has a significant impact on the Nebraska economy. Approximately 10 percent of …

Self-Correcting Kelly Strategies For Skeptical Traders, Aaron C. Brown

International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking

The Kelly criterion gives the appropriate bet size in idealized situations with known parameters. In financial trading situations parameters are generally unknown and the mathematical assumptions underlying the Kelly proof are not met precisely. Moreover a risk manager typically must cooperate with a trader who may be skeptical about both the Kelly criterion specifically and the concept of mathematical optimization of bet size in general.

This presentation tackles the problem of designing a Kelly-based system for setting trade risk management parameters that is both self-correcting (the system delivers good results even if initial parameter are misestimated or parameters change) and …

Crop Price Patterns, Jessica J. Groskopf

Extension Farm and Ranch Management News

No abstract provided.