Economic Situations and Social Distance: Taxation and Donation
by Alexander Brandt
Abstract:
This experimental study evaluated the effects of two common economic situations – taxation and donation – on the social distance between participants in the situations, an original effect of interest that is the opposite of prior research. This study employed a novel survey framework, in which subjects gave money to others in the economic situations and socially judged recipients of their money. Findings mostly did not support predictions that the economic situations would differently affect social distance, but the novel framework enabled an effective test of the effect of economic situations on social distance and is a major contribution to the field.
Professor Rachel E. Kranton, Faculty Advisor
Professor Scott A. Huettel, Faculty Advisor
Professor Grace Kim, Seminar Advisor
JEL Codes: C91; D64; D89; D90
A computational model of food choice: Utility optimization through external cuing and heuristic search
By Lucie Yang
The field of economics tends to view decision-making through a lens of assumed rationality and utility maximization. Unfortunately, choices in reality tend to be more complicated than perfect conscious value assignment. One such type of decision-making is food choice, which incorporates not only many inherent values (health, taste, price, energy), but also exists in a world of many external influences (marketing, social pressure). The details of the space in which choices are made can be highly influential, disrupting the typical top-down attentional decision-making assumed with a homo economicus. This paper seeks to utilize a behavioral experiment, eye-tracking, and a novel computational model (the drift diffusion model) in an effort to explore how humans make food decisions. The drift diffusion model links the metrics, reaction time, gaze fixations, and eye movement path length and frequency to the probability of subsequently choosing each item. The model takes into account not only the intrinsic attractiveness of each item, but also the context surrounding them, creating group distributions as well as individual distributions for parameters of the decision process. This paper aims to look at various aspects of food decisions: how do personal internal states, visual salience, and external cues effect how one weights the multiple value characteristics of food.
Advisors: Kent Kimbrough, Philip Sadowski, Scott Huettel, Jonathan Winkle | JEL Codes: D8, D80, D87 | Tagged: Decision-Making, Drift Diffusion Model, Food Consumption, Neuroeconomics
