Asymmetric treatment of identical agents in teams

We investigate when identical agents will be treated asymmetrically in a simple team setting. Asymmetric treatment is optimal when the agents’ individual contributions to team performance are strategic complements. Symmetric treatment of identical agents is optimal when the agents’ contributions are strategic substitutes or when they are independent.     

Within-series momentum in hockey: No returns for running up the score

Drawing on data from 916 Division 1 men’s college hockey games played during a recent six-year period in the Western Collegiate Hockey Association (WCHA), we find evidence that positive momentum within 458 two-game series does not exist when controlling for team quality. We find that neither victory nor the margin of victory in Game 1 of a two-game series is predictive of the outcome of Game 2. We suggest that loss aversion should be considered in relation to questions of momentum.     

Do the world’s largest cities follow Zipf’s and Gibrat’s laws?

We examine whether the size distribution and the growth process of the world’s largest cities follow Zipf’s law and Gibrat’s law. The parametric results of the size distribution analysis reject Zipf’s law for all sample sizes and also show the Zipf exponent systematically declines as the sample size increases. The growth process analysis confirms Gibrat’s law and yields a local Zipf exponent of one for cities with a normalized population less than 0.53%, which includes about 95% of the total observations. The deviations from Zipf’s law occur at the extreme upper tail and are likely a result of restricted mobility of population across countries. However, given that Gibrat’s law holds, we can expect the size distribution to converge to Zipf’s law with a decline in the barriers to immigration.     

The intergenerational transmission of education: Evidence from Taiwanese adoptions

This paper examines the causal effect of parental schooling on children’s schooling using a large sample of adoptees from Taiwan. Using birth-parents’ education to help control for selective placement of children with adoptive parents, we find that adoptees raised with more highly educated parents have higher educational attainment, measured by years of schooling and probability of university graduation. We also find evidence that adoptive father’s schooling is more important for sons’ and adoptive mother’s schooling is more important for daughters’ educational attainment. These results support the notion that family environment (nurture) is important in determining children’s educational outcomes, independent of genetic endowment.     

Can industry regulators learn collusion structures from information-efficient asset markets?

This note combines a dynamic industrial organization model, in which an industry is subject to exogenous processes of market-size and collusion structure, with a consumption-based asset pricing model for the shares in the industry’s firms. Three main findings emerge for our model under the assumption of information-efficient asset markets. First, the volatility of a firm’s share price is exclusively driven by the volatility of the industry’s market-size. Second, the volatility of a firm’s price-dividend ratio is exclusively driven by the volatility of the industry’s collusion structure whereby high (resp. low) ratios indicate less (resp. more) collusion. Third, for non-volatile collusion structures the price-dividend ratio is constant across different collusion structures.     

Risk attitudes and the stag-hunt game

A stag-hunt game (with the risky and safe actions) has two pure Nash equilibria that are Pareto-rankable. The risky action leads either to the Pareto-superior equilibrium (high payoff) or to out of equilibrium (low payoff) depending on the opponent’s action. Both players may want to obtain high payoff but uncertainty about the opponent’s action may prevent them to take such strategic risk. This paper investigates how information about the risk attitude of an opponent affects a player’s action choice in the stag-hunt game. I find that although a subject’s propensity to choose the risky action depends on her opponent’s risk attitude, it does not depend on her own risk attitude.     

An alternative proof of Fishburn’s axiomatization of lexicographic preferences

We present an alternative proof of Fishburn’s (1975) axiomatization of lexicographic preferences. The essence of our proof lies in identifying “an extremely pivotal factor”. Our proof reconfirms the strong interconnections between Arrow’s and Gibbard–Satterthwaite’s theorems with Fishburn’s axiomatization.     

创业团队风险决策的修正效应与影响因素

创业决策具有高的风险性,如何提高创业团队风险决策的质量是一个值得探讨的问题。提出了创业团队风险决策的修正效应,以此衡量决策的过程质量,通过对46支大学生创业团队的实证研究,探究了群体凝聚力与决策过程中的成员参与度对团队风险决策修正效应的影响作用。结果显示:团队的任务凝聚力对团队决策的修正效应起到了显著的正向影响作用,成员参与度是两者关系的重要调节因素,在高的成员参与度下,任务凝聚力对团队决策的修正效应具有更大的促进作用;而团队的人际凝聚力对团队决策的修正效应没有显著影响作用。在此基础上,对提高创业团队风险决策的质量提出了相应的管理建议。     

Evaluating the median voter model’s explanatory power

We match individual senators’ voting behavior on legislative proposals with 24 real referendum decisions on exactly the same issues with identical wording. This setting allows us to evaluate the median voter model’s quality with revealed constituents’ preferences. Results indicate a limited explanatory power of the median voter model: It explains 17.6% points more than random voting and that a senator’s probability to accept a proposal in parliament increases on average by 8.4% points when the district median voter accepts the proposal.     

Discoveries of fakes: Their impact on the art market

This paper shows that before (after) fakes’ discoveries, artworks are less (more) likely to be sold through Sotheby’s or Christie’s. Prices only react negatively with a lag, suggesting that sellers try to postpone their sales as long as possible.     

R&D团队中领导行为、创新氛围与知识创新的关系:案例研究

采用案例研究方法,以全球最著名的研发机构——美国国家航空航天局(NASA)为例,分析了R&D团队中的领导行为与知识创新的关系以及团队创新氛围在其中的中介作用。根据SECI模型,探索了团队层面的R&D团队知识创新的结构维度,得到R&D团队领导行为、团队创新氛围与知识创新间关系的修正模型。案例研究结果表明:R&D团队中的领导行为对团队知识创新的影响部分是通过创新氛围实现的;社会情境在团队创新氛围与知识创新之间起调节作用。     

Team work and incentives: The origins and development of the butty gang system in Queensland's sugar industry, 1891–1913

In Queensland's sugar industry, a butty gang referred to a cane-cutting team operating on a collective piece-rate basis, by which each member of the team shared equally in the joint earnings of the team according to the number of days worked. This paper combines theory and evidence to investigate the origins and development of the butty gang system in Queensland's sugar industry between 1891 and 1913. Attention is focused on the economic organization of the team, the nature of the incentives implicit in the collective piece-rate arrangement, and the determinants of the optimum size of the team.     

Paying the price of sweetening your donation: Evidence from a natural field experiment

We add a gift in appreciation of the subject’s contribution to a social reference treatment successfully proven to trigger higher donations, and find that the share of people contributing decreases significantly, thereby eroding the original treatment’s capacity to increase donations.     

Vulgar economy in Marxian garb: a critique of Temporal Single System Marxism

This paper presents a critique of recent efforts, under the rubric of Temporal Single System Marxism, to defend Marx’s value theory against the claim that his transformation algorithm is flawed. Although Marx did make a number of errors in elaborating his theory of value and the profit rate, these missteps do not undermine his larger scientific project. Far greater damage has been inflicted by his would-be Temporal Single System defenders, who camouflage Marx’s errors by detaching him from his Ricardian roots; in the process they redefine value in a way that trivializes its function in Marx’s system.     

Interactive team reasoning: A contribution to the theory of co-operation

This paper describes interactions between agents who sometimes choose as individuals and sometimes as members of teams. Choosing as a member of a team entails not only being motivated by the team's objective, but also a distinctive pattern of reasoning: an agent who “team reasons” computes, and chooses her component in, aprofile evaluated using the team's objective function. It is not assumed that a given agent team reasons for a particular team; there may be more than one team, and which she reasons for is here treated probabilistically. Ordinary reasoning is a special case in which the team is a singleton. The framework therefore encompasses interactions paradigmatic in the theory of co-operative behaviour in which agents may choose either for the group of for themselves. The hypothesis that people may team reason if and when they are group motivated can, it is shown, explain some puzzling aspects of co-operative behaviour in a new way.     

A mechanism for eliciting a probability distribution

This work extends Karni’s direct revelation mechanism for eliciting agents’ subjective beliefs over the distribution of a random variable.     

Impatience among preschool children and their mothers

Using experimental data of children and their mothers, this paper explores the intergenerational relationship of impatience. The child’s impatience stems from a delay of gratification experiment, the mother’s from a choice task. Findings demonstrate an intergenerational relationship in decision making.     

Male versus female guest-worker migration: Does it matter for fertility in the source country?

Men’s additional income from their guest-worker employment generates a pure income effect, which increases fertility. The timing of women’s higher-wage employment relative to child bearing is crucial for its effect on fertility. If women work abroad during the same time period when they can bear children, their additional income generates a substitution effect, which reduces fertility. In contrast, if the time period when women work abroad does not coincide with the period when they bear children, their additional income generates the income effect on fertility, which is not different from that of men’s additional income.     

Public randomization in the repeated prisoner’s dilemma game with local interaction

We consider a situation in which each agent observes only their neighbor’s actions and locally interacts with them by playing prisoner’s dilemma games. Introducing a public randomization, we construct an equilibrium which sustains cooperation and in which cooperation eventually resumes after any history.     

Removed preferences

In formalizing a ‘veil of ignorance’ type procedure, this paper considers how an agent?s preferences over a set of alternatives change as he is placed at an increasing ‘distance’ from the consequences of his choices. A definition for such ‘removed preferences’ is presented and its properties studied. As an application, it is demonstrated that present biased agents are ‘essentially’ exponential when distanced from the present, and that rank-dependent expected utility agents are ‘essentially’ expected utility when distanced from risk.