971 research outputs found
Monopoly pricing in the binary herding model
No full textHow should a monopolist price when selling to buyers who learn from each other’s decisions? Focusing on the case in which the common value of the good is binary and each buyer receives a binary private signal about that value, we completely answer this question for all values of the production cost, the precision of the buyers’ signals, and the seller’s discount factor. Unexpectedly, we find that there is a region of parameters for which learning stops at intermediate and at extreme beliefs, but not at beliefs that lie between those intermediate and extreme beliefs
Do Women Shy Away From Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?
No full textCompetitive high ranking positions are largely occupied by men, and women remain scarce in engineering and sciences. Explanations for these occupational differences focus on discrimination and preferences for work hours and field of study. We examine if absent these factors gender differences in occupations may still occur. Specifically we explore whether women and men, on a leveled playing field, differ in their selection into competitive environments. Men and women in a laboratory experiment perform a real task under a non-competitive piece rate and a competitive tournament scheme. Although there are no gender differences in performance under either compensation, there is a substantial gender difference when participants subsequently choose the scheme they want to apply to their next performance. Twice as many men as women choose the tournament over the piece rate. This gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance either before or after the entry decision. Furthermore, while men are more optimistic about their relative performance, differences in beliefs only explain a small share of the gap in tournament entry. In a final task we assess the impact of non-tournament-specific factors, such as risk and feedback aversion, on the gender difference in compensation choice. We conclude that even controlling for these general factors, there is a large residual gender gap in tournament entry.
The Carrot or the Stick: Rewards, Punishments and Cooperation
No full textWe examine demands for rewards and punishments in a simple proposer-responder game. The proposer first makes an offer to split a fixed-sized pie. According to the 2 × 2 design, the responder is or is not given a costly option of increasing or decreasing the proposer’s pay-off. We find substantial demands for both punishments and rewards. While rewards alone have little influence on cooperation, punishments have some. When the two are combined the effect on cooperation is dramatic, suggesting that rewards and punishments are complements in producing cooperation. Providing new insights to what motivates these demands is the surprising finding that the demands for rewards depend on the availability of punishments. ∗This paper was written while Harbaugh and Vesterlund were visiting the Center on Philanthropy and the Department of Economics at IUPUI, and while Vesterlund later was visiting Harvard Business School. We are grateful for their hospitality and financial support. We also acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation. Finally
How Costly is Diversity? Affirmative Action in Light of Gender Differences in Competitiveness
No full textRecent research documents that while men are eager to compete, women often shy away from competitive environments. A consequence is that few women enter and win competitions. Using experimental methods we examine how affirmative action affects competitive entry. We find that when women are guaranteed equal representation among winners, more women and fewer men enter competitions, and the response exceeds that predicted by changes in the probability of winning. An explanation for this response is that under affirmative action the probability of winning depends not only on one's rank relative to other group members, but also on one's rank within gender. Both beliefs on rank and attitudes towards competition change when moving to a more gender-specific competition. The changes in competitive entry have important implications when assessing the costs of affirmative action. Based on ex-ante tournament entry affirmative action is predicted to lower the performance requirement for women and thus result in reverse discrimination towards men. Interestingly this need not be the outcome when competitive entry is not payoff maximizing. The response in entry implies that it may not be necessary to lower the performance requirement for women to achieve a more diverse set of winners.
Prospect Theory or Skill Signaling?
No full textFailure is embarrassing. In gambles involving both skill and chance, we show that a strategic desire to avoid appearing unskilled generates behavioral anomalies that are typically explained by prospect theory’s concepts of loss aversion, probability weighting, and framing effects. Loss aversion arises because losing any gamble, even a friendly bet with little or no money at stake, reflects poorly on the decision maker’s skill. Probability weighting emerges because winning a gamble with a low probability of success is a strong signal of skill, while losing a gamble with a high probability of success is a strong signal of incompetence. Framing matters when there are multiple equilibria and the framing of a gamble affects beliefs, e.g., when someone takes a “dare” rather than admit a lack of skill. The analysis is based on models from the career concerns literature and is closely related to early social psychology models of risk taking. The results provide an alternative perspective on the existence of prospect theory behavior in economic, financial, and managerial decisions where both skill and chance are important. We identify specific situations where skill signaling makes opposite predictions than prospect theory, allowing for tests between the strategic and behavioral approaches to understanding risk.prospect theory, career concerns, probability weighting, loss aversion, framing effects, dare taking, embarrassment aversion
Money Talks? An Experimental Study of Rebate in Reputation System Design
No full textReputation systems that rely on feedback from traders are important institutions for helping sustain trust in markets, while feedback information is usually considered a public good. We apply both theoretical models and experiments to study how raters' feedback behavior responds to different reporting costs and how to improve market efficiency by introducing a pre-commitment device for sellers in reputation systems. In particular, the pre-commitment device we study here allows sellers to provide rebates to cover buyers' reporting costs before buyers make purchasing decisions. Using a buyer-seller trust game with a unilateral feedback scheme, we find that a buyer’s propensity to leave feedback is more sensitive to reporting costs when the seller cooperates than when the seller defects. The seller’s decision on whether to provide a rebate significantly affects the buyer’s decision to leave feedback by compensating for the feedback costs. More importantly, the rebate decision has a significant impact on the buyer's purchasing decision via signaling the seller's cooperative type. The experimental results show that the rebate mechanism improves the market efficiency.reputation, trust, feedback mechanism, asymmetric information, public goods, experimental economics
Dynamic monopoly pricing and herding
No full textThis paper studies dynamic pricing by a monopolist selling to buyers who learn from each other’s purchases. The price posted in each period serves to extract rent from the current buyer, as well as to control the amount of information transmitted to future buyers. As information increases future rent extraction, the monopolist has an incentive to subsidize learning by charging a price that results in information revelation. Nonetheless in the long run, the monopolist generally induces herding by either selling to all buyers or exiting the market
Tecniche narrative nelle autobiografie italiane del Secondo Settecento
No full textThis Ph.D thesis analyses seven autobioraphies by italian writers, all born in in the Eighteenth century: Vittorio Alfieri, Carlo Goldoni, Lorenzo Da Ponte, Giacomo Casanova, Filippo Mazzei, Francesco Bal. It is divided in two parts: the first concerns with microtextuality aspects (incipit, explicit, dialogues, descriptions); the second deals with the macrotextuality ones (structures of time, structures of the plot). Besides evalutating in which ways the autobiographies organize their narration, the author compares them with Eighteenth Century italian novels and with other autobiographical works to see how much their structure is different
Accountability and Accreditation in the Nonprofit Sector: Examining the Louisiana Standards for Excellence Model:
No full textThe nonprofit sector of our economy is a special class of entities with an expansive array of organizations and activities dedicated to the common good and well-being of others. Even though this sector has constructed creative and forward thinking initiatives, obstacles remain which interfere with their accomplishment of significant achievements. The struggle to maintain their respected position, unique character and role in society remains prevalent. In order to stay competitive, organizations are constantly assessing their current capacity to deliver needed services. Today, a number of umbrella associations of nonprofits have implemented assessment and certification programs intended to produce organizational improvement for their member organizations. Based on analysis of phenomenological interviews and guided by institutional theory, the research reported here is designed to identify factors that differentiate between organizations that chose to participate in the Louisiana Standards for Excellence organizational assessment program and those that did not. Drawing on concepts of organizational learning and broadened accountability, the research further explores whether those nonprofits successfully achieving certification experience an enhanced commitment to ongoing organizational learning.Doctorate of Management ProgramsEnglis
- …
