1,720,985 research outputs found
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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Studies in Behavioral Environmental Economics
No full textMy dissertation consists of three chapters that use a behavioral economic framework to enrich our understanding of the political economy of environmental policies. Chapter 1 explores the role of cognitive frictions in the perceived distributional impacts of externality pricing. Despite their desirable properties, carbon prices have received very low public support. Leading explanations attribute the rejection of carbon pricing to preferences and ideology. I show that, instead, much of this rejection is due to mistakes voters make when reasoning about the consequences of such policies. Using laboratory experiments, I show that subjects have specific blind spots in reasoning about a key pricing policy structure, even in abstract tasks that remove scope for preferences and ideologies. Based on these findings, I introduce a new policy that is isomorphic to a leading carbon pricing proposal, but engineered to be robust to these cognitive frictions. The new policy (which I call ``carbon penalty and reward'') garners significantly more support than the original proposal (known as ``carbon fee and dividend''). Using independent cognitive measures, I show that the increase in support is concentrated in people exhibiting systematic difficulty reasoning about a key policy structure.Chapter 2, which is joint work with Guglielmo Zappalà, details how exposure to environmental policy in the past shapes preferences for them. Low public support has been an obstacle to the enactment of stronger environmental policies. Yet if policies are enacted, support for them may change. Using surveys covering 38 countries around the world, we study the dynamics of environmental policies and individual preferences over time. Exploiting within-country, across birth-cohort variation in exposure to environmental policy stringency, we document that cohorts exposed to more stringent policies in the past are more supportive of environmental policies at the time of the survey, with the effect largely driven by exposure during a period of early adulthood known as the formative age window. This result even holds when evaluating exposure to a specific policy instrument, environmental taxes. Past exposure to these taxes improves support for them, but not for other environmental policies. This relationship suggests that a society's environmental policy attitudes evolve endogenously, with implications for normative frameworks used in welfare economics.Chapter 3 evaluates how quick, inattentive decision-making systematically distorts perceptions of the effectiveness of pricing in reducing pollution externalities. When people are asked to make policy choices that affect a good's price -- for example, a tax to reduce a negative externality -- we traditionally assume that they accurately perceive quantities demanded conditional on price. But failures to consider substitutes and other adaptations to a permanent price shock can result, ex ante, in a perception of inelasticity and policy ineffectiveness. In past surveys, perceptions of ineffectiveness are among the main reasons voters do not support a carbon tax, believing it would fail to cut emissions unless the revenue were spent on offsetting projects. I implement an incentivized survey experiment to test whether increasing time and promoting hypothetical thinking increase subjective perception of responsiveness of demand to price, and I find meaningful, directional effects
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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Experimental Studies on Information Economics
Full text linkThis dissertation consists of three experimental studies on information economics, exploring the topics of the demand for information, the choice and use of information, and information design within strategic contexts.Chapter 1 studies how people choose sets of information sources (referred to as information bundles). The findings reveal that subjects frequently fail to choose the more instrumentally valuable bundle in binary choices, largely due to the challenge of integrating the information sources within a bundle to identify their joint information content. The mistakes in choices can not be attributed to an inability to use information bundles. Instead, these mistakes are strongly explained by subjects' tendency to follow a simple but imperfect heuristic when valuing them, which we call "common source cancellation (CSC)''. The heuristic causes subjects to mistakenly disregard the common information source in two bundles and focus solely on the comparison of the sources that the two bundles do not share. As a result, choices between information bundles are made without adequately considering the joint information content of each bundle. Notably, CSC emerges as a robust explanation for the information bundle choices for all subjects, including those who make perfect use of information bundles to make inferences.Chapter 2, based on a joint work with Ryan Oprea and Sevgi Yuksel, studies how people’s demand for information structures is shaped by their informativeness—the reduction in uncertainty they produce. To do this, we introduce new methods that remove confounds for information demand like failures of Bayesian reasoning. We show that people (i) strongly demand informativeness when it has instrumental value but also (ii) display a sharp aversion to informativeness when it cannot be used to improve choice, sometimes leading to costly errors in information choice. Several strands of evidence suggest that this aversion is driven by subjective information processing costs that rise with informativeness.Chapter 3, based on a joint work with Sen Geng, explores theoretically and experimentally whether information design can be used by trustees as a signaling device to boost trusting acts. In our main setting, a trustee partially or fully decides a binary payoff allocation and designs an information structure; then a trustor decides whether to invest. In the control setting, information design is not available. In line with the standard equilibrium analysis, we find that introducing information design increases trustworthiness and trusting acts, and some trustees choose full trustworthiness with the most informative structure. We also find systematic behavioral deviations, including some trustees' choosing zero trustworthiness with the least informative structure and trustors' overtrusting in low informative structures. We finally provide a model of heterogeneity in prosociality and strategic sophistication, which rationalizes the experimental findings
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Three Essays in Behavioral and Experimental Economics
Full text linkThis dissertation consists of three chapters that explore why individuals make seemingly suboptimal decisions in risk management, why they fail to use information in a Bayesian manner when updating their beliefs, and how novel methodological tools can be developed to advance modelling and inference about subjective beliefs or perceptions, considering cognitive limitations.Chapter 1 studies the underlying mechanisms behind a classical behavioral puzzle in risk management, called Probability Matching. Probability matching refers to people's tendency to randomize between different risky options, or even match their choice frequency to the outcome probability, when choosing over binary lotteries that differ only in their probabilities. Why? I present an experiment designed to distinguish between three broad classes of explanations: models of Correlation-Invariant Stochastic Choice (mixing due to factors orthogonal to how outcomes are jointly determined, such as non-standard preferences or errors), models of Correlation-Sensitive Stochastic Choice (e.g., deliberately mixing due to misperceived hedging opportunity), and Framing Effects (indecisiveness due to frame-sensitive heuristics e.g., similarity heuristic: attending to dissimilar but irrelevant attributes (outcomes), while ignoring relevant attributes (probabilities)). My experimental design uses a diagnostic approach, differentiating between their testable predictions over a series of treatments. The results suggest that a substantial proportion of mixing behavior aligns with models of Correlation-Sensitive Stochastic Choice, while the other classes have limited explanatory power.In Chapter 2, a joint work with Menglong Guan, ChienHsun Lin, and Ravi Vora, we experimentally investigate how people value and utilize different statistical characteristics of a set of realized binary signals, referred to as sample features, to understand why individuals deviation from the Bayesian benchmark when updating beliefs. We find that, subjects systematically under-infer the information contained in each sample feature. Furthermore, the magnitude of under-inference significantly varies across sample features. Specifically, under-inference is least severe with Sample Proportion (the relative frequency of different outcomes in the realized signals), compared to more informative features such as Sample Count (the absolute number of different outcomes in the realized signals). We also find that the standard measure of informativeness used in information theory does not fully explain subjects' preferences for sample features. Subjects demonstrate a strict preference for the information contained in the Sample Proportion over those without it and undervalue the usefulness of sample size. Combining preference and belief updating behaviors, we find that subjects deviate less from the Bayesian benchmark when provided with a more-preferred feature than a less-preferred one. These results suggest that some biases in signal usage is more likely an intentional deviation rather than a result of inattentive heuristics.In Chapter 3, a joint work with Xin Jiang, we introduce a novel elicitation method, called the Dynamic Binary Method (DBM), designed to address the common challenge individuals face in pinpointing the best point estimate of their beliefs, particularly when their beliefs are imprecise. Unlike Classical Methods (CM), which require respondents to make absolute judgments and form a point estimate of their true beliefs, DBM guides them through a series of binary relative judgments, enabling them to express interval beliefs by exiting the process at any step. To assess the empirical validity of DBM, we conduct both within-subject and between-subject experiments using a diverse range of perception tasks drawn from previous literature and CM as a benchmark of performances in each task. We find that DBM does not perform significantly differently from CM at the aggregate level, regardless of whether the perception questions use artificial/laboratory settings or real-life settings, and irrespective of the measurement used. Notably, DBM outperforms CM when the objective truth is extreme. Furthermore, we find a negative correlation between the length of stated beliefs in tasks using DBM and their accuracy. Additionally, we find that the length stated in DBM can predict respondents' performance in CM tasks at the aggregate level, albeit not strictly in a monotonic manner. Finally, we explore methods to use DBM-collected data for predicting stated point beliefs in DBM, offering insights into potential applications of the method beyond its immediate implementation
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Three Essays on Experimental and Microeconomics
Full text linkThis dissertation contains three chapters on experimental economics and microeconomics. In the first chapter, Dynamic Investment and Preferences over the Resolution of Risk, I report the results of a laboratory experiment which attempts to explain the finding that individuals invest less in risky assets when risk is gradually resolved over time, rather than all at once. Though the literature has traditionally attributed this behavior to a cognitive error, Koszegi and Rabin (2009) recently characterized this finding as the result of non-standard preferences over the resolution of risk. My results reject the traditional "cognitive errors" explanation in favor of Koszegi and Rabin's "non-standard preferences" explanation. In the second chapter, Kidney Co-operative: A Mechanism to Improve on Human Kidney Markets, myself and coauthors propose a mechanism called the kidney co-operative which is designed to provide sufficient incentives to alleviate the human kidney shortage, while at the same time addressing the concerns regarding the potential losers to such a reform. We show that it is reasonable to expect that the number of transplants will be larger under the kidney co-operative mechanism than under either the status quo or the conventional market mechanism. In the third chapter, Charity in the Laboratory:Matching, Competition, and Group Identity, myself and a coauthor study the effects of donation matching, competition, and group membership on charitable donations using a laboratory experiment. We find that providing matching donations to all subjects orhaving individuals compete for the privilege to have their donations matched (we match the top half of donations in each session), raises donation levels modestly. However, arbitrarily assigning subjects to teams which competed for matching funds substantially raised donation levels. We appeal to the notions of group identity and team dynamics to explain our results
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Three Essays on Experimental Economics and Applied Microeconomics
Full text linkThis dissertation consists of two essays in experimental economics and one in applied microeconomics. The first chapter, Preferences over Exploration: Simple Bandits in the Lab, presents an experimental study about how people view the trade-off between exploration (trying a new option) and exploitation (taking a familiar option). This study documents a large and persistent tendency of people to under-explore, even in the simplest possible bandit setting. By simplifying the environment, the study can directly control for risk preferences, abstract from other issues such as ambiguity, Bayesian updating, or failures to reduce compound lotteries. The second chapter, Complexity and Procedural Choice: Evidence from Experimental Bandits, presents an experiment about how subjects select procedural rules to make decisions in a simple bandit task. The optimal strategy involves a relatively sophisticated 4-state decision rule. When complexity costs are low, subjects conform to the optimal behavior; when complexity costs are higher, holding other aspects of the problem constant, subjects systematically employ lower-complexity rules. This suggests that aversion to complexity causes subjects to play simpler strategies and earn lower payoffs. The final chapter, The Economics of the Montana Liquor License System, is an applied microeconomics paper about the the liquor license system in the state of Montana. The state has a complicated system of quotas for liquor licenses, involving multiple license types, which are tradable within quota area (and occasionally between quota areas). The study offers a simple model of the system, providing testable hypotheses. Empirical results support these hypotheses, indicating that gambling revenue, non-permanent population, and income all positively affect prices, while the emergence of small-scale producers (e.g., craft breweries) negatively affect license prices
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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