Let’s Talk About Race (or Anything)
by Julia Ruolan Ma Abstract Oral history interviews contain rich information about how individuals understand their experiences, but their length and complexity have limited their use in empirical research. I develop episodic interview analysis, a framework that segments each interview into thematic episodes at natural transition points, constructing six composite indices capturing both what narrators […]
How the System Matches: Preference Alignment and Waiting Costs in Brazilian Adoption
by Yuri de Melo Costa Abstract I study how Brazil’s Sistema Nacional de Adoção e Acolhimento (SNA) (National Adoption System) matches Children and Adolescents (CAs) to Prospective Adoptive Parents (PAPs). Despite a ratio of roughly seven certified PAPs per available CA, thousands of children remain in institutional care. Using administrative microdata from the SNA linking […]
The Sub-proportionality of Subjective Probability Weighting in Poker
by William Clark Abstract This study uses Texas Hold’em poker to investigate decision making under uncertainty and the concept of probability weighting, where individuals may overvalue or undervalue uncertain outcomes. I conduct an experiment to assess Cumulative Prospect Theory’s relevance to subjective probabilities in poker by simplifying the game to compare complex and simple gamble […]
Bias in Fact Checking?: An Analysis of Partisan Trends Using PolitiFact Data
by Thomas A. Colicchio Abstract Fact checking is one of many tools that journalists use to combat the spread of fake news in American politics. Like much of the mainstream media, fact checkers have been criticized as having a left-wing bias. The efficacy of fact checking as a tool for promoting honesty in public discourse […]
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 […]
Incentive Programs for Neglected Diseases
By Pranav Ganapathy We propose and evaluate an auction mechanism for the priority review voucher program. The 2007 voucher program rewards drug developers for regulatory approval of novel treatments for neglected tropical diseases. Previous papers have proposed auctioning vouchers for the priority review voucher program but have offered neither a mathematical model nor a […]
Overreaction in the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE)
By Yusuke Ewan Tanaka Legard The Overreaction Hypothesis suggests that investors overreact to unexpected news in the financial world, which leads to a mispricing of equities. This paper investigates the presence of overreaction in the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) between 1995 and 2018. The empirical methodology studies the monthly returns of equities in the […]
Deterring Ineffcient Gambling in Risk-Taking Agents
By Ryan Westphal This paper proposes a model describing the incentive issues faced by principals and agents when the agent has limited liability and is capable of undertaking unidentifiable, inefficient risky behavior. We propose a contract structure by which the principal deters risk by deferring payment to the agent until she reaches an absorbing steady-state […]
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 […]
Incentives and Characteristics that Explain Generic Prescribing Practices
By Rahul Nayak This study uses the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (2006-2010) and Health Tracking Physician Survey (2008) to study the incentives and characteristics that explain physician generic prescribing habits. The findings can be characterized into four main categories: (1) financial/economic, (2) informational, (3) patient- dependent and (4) drug idiosyncratic effects. Physicians in practices […]
