Education and electoral participation: reported versus actual voting behaviour

Using survey data of voters in Tanzania, this article shows that while education does not affect self-reported voting in general elections, it increases actual voting. The less educated are more likely to claim to have voted without having done so, which may explain why previous studies of voting in developing countries fail to find an effect of education. We demonstrate the importance of this finding by using our survey data to generate predicted voting probabilities for the respondents to the 2012 Afrobarometer survey in Tanzania and show that while mean self-reported voting does not differ much at different levels of education, the differences become significant when taking into account voting misrepresentation.     

Asking sensitive questions: the impact of forgiving wording and question context on social desirability bias

Sensitive questions are prone to systematic measurement error due to the respondents?? social desirability concerns. Literature on empirical social research often recommends either positive ??loading?? of sensitive questions, e.g. using ??forgiving?? wording, or manipulating the question context to reduce social desirability bias. We derive theoretical explanations of how manipulations of question wording and context could elicit more socially undesirable answers in sensitive surveys. In an experimental online survey (N?=?1,176), we evaluate the effects of (1) forgiving wording and (2) question context on social desirability bias in different sensitive questions. The empirical evidence on the assumed bias-reducing effects shows inconsistent results. It is indicated however, that the perceived social norm has the strongest and most consistent effect on the respondents?? propensity to self-report socially undesirable behavior.     

What constitutes a convention? Implications for the coexistence of conventions

A model of repeated play of a coordination game, in which stage games have a location in social space and players receive noisy signals of the true location of their games, is reviewed. Sugden (1995) (The coexistence of conventions. J Econ Behav Organ 28:241–256) suggests that, in such a model, there can be a stationary state of convention coexistence only if interaction is non-uniform across social space. This paper shows that an alternative definition of conventions, which links conventions to actions rather than expectations, permits convention coexistence when interaction is uniform. To assess robustness, the concept of a global mutant is introduced, to which certain states of coexistence are robust.

Gesetz und Norm in der nationalökonomischen Theorie

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

The framing of risks and the communication of subjective probabilities for victimizations

What does ??likely?? mean, when respondents estimate the risk to become a victim of crime? Victimization risks can either be interpreted as gains (??being spared of offences??) or as losses (??becoming a victim of crime??). Because losses are perceived as more severe, respondents will state lower subjective victimization probabilities in the loss-frame, compared to the gain-frame. We demonstrate such a framing-effect with data from an experimental survey. Furthermore, we show that the meaning of vague quantifiers varies with the frequency and the severity of the event. Respondents assign to the same vague quantifiers (e.g. ??unlikely??) higher likelihoods in terms of percentages for frequent and for less severe events than for infrequent and for severe events. In conclusion, respondents do not use vague quantifiers consistently so that it is problematic to compare subjective risks for different victimizations.     

Computationally simple lattice methods for option and bond pricing

We propose new lattice-based algorithms for option and bond pricing, which rely on computationally simple trees, i.e., trees with the number of nodes that grows at most linearly in the number of time intervals. Contrary to commonly used methods, the target diffusion is approximated directly, without having to transform the original process into a constant volatility process. The discrete approximating process converges to the target continuous process, and the proposed algorithms are shown to be efficient and accurate for pricing purposes.