Framing it right? Normative representational standards for decision theory

Decision problems are non-exhaustive and selective representations that raise a number of philosophical issues. Framing effects are a case in point: Differentways of framing or representing a particular decision situation may lead to different choices, in violation of the Extensionality principle. Extensionality stipulates that different descriptions of the same outcome or option should lead to identical evaluations and choices. This dissertation examines what constitutes a correct representation of a decision situation for bounded agents. Taking a Moderate Humean perspective on rationality, I argue that the literature does not offer satisfactory standards of representation and fails to address a series of selection problems such as the ones raised by framing effects. Instead, I offer an instrumental account whereby agents represent decision situations in a way to achieve the ends they care about. I examine two interpretations of irrational framing effects — as Extensionality violation and as unstable evaluation. I assess both principles and reject these two interpretations. Instead, I introduce the notion of evaluatively equivalent decision situations, and argue that illegitimate framing effects are inconsistent choices across evaluatively equivalent decision situations. The phenomenon illustrates one of the problems of selection that arise from assessing the rationality of decision-theoretic representations. I offer an alternative instrumental account of representation based on differences that the agent cares about, acknowledging that decision problems are partial, constructed, and value-driven representations

Energy as the work of nature: the quandaries of sacrificial productivism in Chiloé, south of Chile

Chiloé, an archipelago in the south of Chile, has been the setting of recent conflicts around the expansion of energy infrastructure. My research explores these contestations in the wider ecological and political context of the relations between the archipelago and the Chilean state. I analyse these conflicts around energy generation as the latest phase of a much longer history of struggles for and against connectivity and related processes of making the land productive. I contextualize the ambiguous relation with energy my interlocutors had in tandem with their idea of work as a human activity. The concept of work, I suggest, is inseparable from the wider moral and political understanding of energy as the work of nature. I argue that both work and energy have been developed as goods in themselves, as part of the historical trajectory of ideas of moral worth, care and productivity in Chiloé Within this context, I show that understanding certain activities as 'work' is not a universal or default category; its imposition has relied worldwide on different institutions. In the case of Chiloé, I focus on the role the Spanishimposed encomienda had as a seminal moment of transformation and displacement of other forms of social action, such as the minga. The contradictions that emerge in the expectations around work can be found in the idea of sacrifice, and in a certain relation to work as being sacrificial. A similar denunciation and understanding of sacrifice can be found in the notion of sacrifice zones, a term used among my interlocutors to express the dangers that come with making a place productive. I develop my argument across two lines: processes of energy planning and other state-led instances of bureaucratic evaluation of energy projects, and the issues Chilote collectives brought forward in their defence of the archipelago’s autonomy in relation to energy projects

Temporal drivers of heterogeneity: understanding the role of "when" in cognition and decision-making

Behavioural science researchers, practitioners, and policymakers have realised how important is to characterize the various drivers of heterogeneity of human behaviour within populations in order to understand intra- and inter individual differences and create better interventions. This thesis examines temporal drivers of heterogeneity, focusing on when decisions are made, especially looking at the day of the week. The day of the week has been shown to affect individual cognition and decision-making, and this is termed the ‘day of the week effect’. This thesis examines the antecedents (paper 1), the potential causes (paper 2), the manifestations (paper 3), and extended applications (paper 4) of the day of the week effect. The first paper reveals that at the start of the day, individual thoughts are largely uniform across the days of the week, focusing on the day ahead and on a to do list. The second paper finds that both individual awareness of the days of the week as well as societal meaning of the days of the week are needed for the days to influence an individual. The third paper finds that the day of the week does not influence engagement with health information. The fourth paper finds that the day of the week does not affect established decision-making patterns or strategies, suggesting that it may only affect certain domains of cognition and decision-making. Overall, this thesis contributes to the ongoing discussion of heterogeneity within behavioural science, in particular adding to the understanding of the day of the week effect

Government on the brink: the effects of political crisis on elites and voters

My PhD journey was filled with inspiring experiences that have helped me mature as a person, for which I will be eternally grateful. However, along the way and as part of this journey, I had to say goodbye to a number of essential people in my life. I would like to pay tribute to their lives with this dissertation. My father, Jaime, along with my grandmother Mami, Uncle Toto, and Aunt Tere, are in my heart. Before anything else, I would like to thank my supervisors for their invaluable support throughout my doctoral journey. I am truly fortunate to have Dr Florian Foos as my first supervisor. More significantly, I consider him my mentor in this academic journey that we have chosen as our career. I want to thank him in particular for being such an exemplary model of integrity, rigour, and kindness. This dissertation would not have been possible without his unwavering support and intellectual debate. Dr Foos always encouraged me to strive for excellence. I am also grateful for his guidance in developing different aspects of my character as an academic. He consistently encouraged me to meet and discuss with numerous visiting scholars and guest speakers, experiences that I greatly appreciate and value. I hope we will continue collaborating in the future. I will never be able to thank Florian enough. I am also incredibly grateful to Professor Rafael Hortala-Vallve, my second supervisor. I am grateful to Professor Hortala-Vallve for always encouraging me to aspire for excellence as an academic researcher. He frequently challenged me to think carefully about the bigger questions that I wanted to answer and provided me with novel insights that I had not considered. I am especially grateful for his big-picture perspective, which was invaluable whenever I got entangled in the details. I would like to thank Professor Peter John and Dr Daniel Berliner for believing in me and inviting me as a co-author from the beginning. Furthermore, I would like to cement a political legacy using a novel semi-structured and nationally representative survey of 3,594 bureaucrats. Finally, the third paper looks at how voters respond to heightened political uncertainty and whether they hold politicians accountable. It leverages transnational corruption scandals, and finds that voters punish transnational corruption cases more severely than domestic ones through a country-based discrimination channel. In conclusion, this dissertation provides novel evidence regarding the use of public resources by politicians to safeguard their legacy during times of crisis or heightened political uncertainty induced by constitutional rules. Conversely, it demonstrates under which conditions the electorate holds elected politicians accountable for their involvement in political scandals

Essays on pension, insurance and mutual fund markets

This thesis contains two essays on investor decisions and the role of financial intermediaries in pension and insurance markets, and one essay on the size effect in the mutual fund market. In the first chapter, my coauthor and I study how investors respond to scandals related to distinct aspects of environmental, social, and governance in their 401(k) retirement savings. We show that nearby ESG scandals correlate with increased ESG fund additions and flows, possibly through “evoking” existing sustainable preferences among investors. Investors with different characteristics respond heterogeneously to E, S, and G scandals, resulting in an overweighting of funds with higher environmental and social scores. In the second chapter, my coauthor and I study the impact of sales channels on insurance product adoption. Using novel policy-level life insurance data in China, we exploit a regulatory change that requires bank insurance agents in each quarter to sell more long-term insurance products. Exploiting a discontinuity-inslope design, we show that bank agents falling below their target qualified ratios in the first two months of a quarter make up for the shortfall in the third month. This shift in the qualified ratio in the last month of the quarter is entirely due to a product-composition change – switching from short-term unqualified life insurance products to long-term qualified annuity products. We further show that this switch is not achieved by changing the relative pricing of products or client compositions. In the third chapter, I examine the relationship between the magnitude of the negative size effect and fund sector concentration. It finds a strong correlation indicating that funds in more concentrated sectors exhibit more severe diminishing returns to scale compared to those in less concentrated sectors. The paper proposes a potential explanation: in highly concentrated sectors, fund flows are less sensitive to past returns. However, in such sectors, marketing expenses appear to positively influence flow sensitivity to good performance, while showing a neutral effect in response to poor performance. Large funds in concentrated sectors may invest more in marketing efforts, but this does not necessarily translate to better future performance

The economic geography of the gig economy in Indonesia

This thesis investigates the economic geography of the gig economy in Indonesia, with the focus on the interplay between workers in the gig economy and their surrounding physical spaces. Although digital platforms have challenged traditional geographic work boundaries, as gig workers continue to operate within physical spaces and set up their work on the ground, this research emphasizes the importance of geography and the spatial context in understanding the gig economy. This thesis contributes to economic geography literature through two main themes. Firstly, it bridges literature on labour agency, platform control, and regional embeddedness. It proposes a robust framework on how gig workers employ various forms of labour agency in physical spaces to improve their working conditions. This research also exposes the dual role of the platform in shaping and constraining labour agency and demonstrates how different forms of agency may have varying effects on their earnings. Additionally, this thesis reintroduces the term "regional embeddedness" to link the labour agency of gig workers with urban studies literature. Despite the remote nature of their work, online gig workers anchor their labour agency to the cities where they live by utilizing multiple locations of workplaces, actively seeking local buzz in communities, and acting as local entrepreneurs to expand their gig services. Secondly, this thesis highlights the urban-centric nature of the gig economy, emphasizing how both location-based and online gig workers gain benefits from urban agglomeration. For location-based gig workers, neighborhood-based communities serve as spaces for constructing collective spatial fixes. On one hand, they may function as coping spaces where individuals engage in social activities to offer mutual support. Conversely, they may serve as transformative spaces that foster a collective consciousness and cultivate a sense of 'community of struggle'. In macro perspective, this thesis emphasizes the significance of intra-urban scale agglomeration in explaining income differences across location-based gig workers. Meanwhile, for online gig workers, factors such as the strong social connections, the reliability and accessibility of urban amenities, the vibrant urban atmosphere, and the reputation of creative cities may explain the unequal distribution of workers across cities. This suggests that the presence of platform-based work is not uniformly translated into equal opportunities across spaces. The thesis consists of a systematic literature review (Chapter 2), three empirical essays (Chapter 3, 4, and 5), and concluding remarks (Chapter 6). Each essay functions as an independent study with different research questions and distinct novelties to specific literature in economic geography. The systematic review aims to understand comprehensively the role of geography in the 6 existing literature of the gig economy. It is found that discussions on spaces and geography extend beyond dedicated geography and urban studies journals and spread across broader literature. Studies incorporating geographical discourse are mapped into three main clusters: (1) the role of physical space in the absence of workplace, (2) the spatial implication of the presence of the gig economy platform, and (3) Collective actions and regulating the gig economy. The first essay explores how income variation across gig drivers working in the gig economy can be explained by workplace location choice and attitudes related to their labour agency. By utilizing survey data from a large sample of gig drivers in Jakarta, this essay found the presence of workplace location premium: drivers who choose to work in areas with concentrated economic activities earn higher payoffs compared to those who stay in less agglomerated areas. This essay also reveals three dimensions of attitudes that matter in explaining income differences. High level of ‘tacit knowledge and driving skills’ tend to increase driver’s income. On the other hand, attitudes related to ‘reliance on technology and the platform’ and ‘social networks’ negatively affect the income. The second essay explores how gig drivers exercised labour agency to improve their working conditions during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on a survey and in-depth interviews with gig drivers in Jakarta, it contributes to the literature by reconceptualizing typology of labour agency in the gig economy based on two main categories: (1) whether the agency aims to transform the system or to cope with the current reality, and (2) whether the agency is undertaken individually or collectively. This essay further presents main obstacles that explain why not all workers may exercise these practices. Finally, it argues that external forces such as pandemic shock, local labour market conditions, and platform control should be considered as factors that shaping and limiting labour agency. It demonstrates that workers in the gig economy are embedded into socio-economic, cultural, and geographical contexts. The third essay investigates how online gig workers embed into the local context to reap the benefit of urban agglomeration. In the absence of a traditional workplace, workers tend to develop a continuous process of becoming part of the city. By drawing on interviews with online gig workers in five secondary cities in Indonesia, this essay structures the notion of regional embeddedness into three main mechanisms. First, workers organize remote tasks ‘on the ground’ by utilizing multiple locations of workplaces. Second, they actively cultivate face-to-face interactions within their social networks for exchanging knowledge and sharing similar identity. Finally, they operate as micro-entrepreneurs who leverage urban density as a business ecosystem to scale up their services

Globalisation, legitimacy and public deliberation

Most significant policy issues facing humanity reach across national borders. Consequential political decisions with cross-national effects are frequently made by states, non-state organisations, and corporations. Under these circumstances, it is widely acknowledged that it is important to conduct public deliberation at the global level. Below this shallow agreement, however, lies much less clarity on how deliberative principles can be applied at the global level. This challenge is the focus of my thesis. I begin by arguing that existing theories of global deliberation have not yet satisfactorily answered two questions. The first pertains to the agents involved: who speaks? The second relates to procedure and institutional design: where should global deliberation take place? In both cases I suggest that modifications to prevalent views in the existing literature are required. To press this argument, the thesis identifies several epistemic and non-epistemic values that public deliberation seeks to realise, before testing candidate proposals for institutionalising global deliberation against these values. I then turn to the primary contribution of the thesis, on the question of how supranational public deliberation should be conducted. To do this I conceptualise and address the problem of global public justification: how, if at all, is it permissible to impose a set of international laws and rules on a world population that is deeply pluralistic in its moral and political attitudes? There have been three main attempts to resolve this problem, locating legitimacy in either competition, neutrality or dialogue between different value systems. I argue that neither of the first two attempts succeeds. I then develop and defend the third route to global legitimacy, outlining its general features, and illustrating how it should proceed. To do this, I analyse a particular value or principle which would be likely to emerge from philosophical dialogue as a publicly justifiable value for use in global decision-making: the value of ‘oneness’

Essays in informational political economy

In this dissertation I study the strategic interactions between politicians, organized interest groups, and citizens, in democratic and non-democratic settings. All chapters focus on the citizens' problem of learning about the performance of their elected official, or of the current autocrat. In chapter 1, I evaluate the role of lobbying transparency laws in helping voters hold their politicians accountable and control the influence on policy-making by special interest groups. In chapter 2, I consider the problem of censorship in the internet-era for modern dictators. I argue that the internet may have entrenched authoritarian regimes because it gave more choice to citizens, thus making feasible a novel form of segmented access to information. In chapter 3, I contend that the existence of purely informational censorship incentives for authoritarian leaders hinges on the distribution of political preferences

Social determinants of international competitive advantage: the case of Turkish contractors

Turkish construction industry experienced a disproportionate growth in global markets between 2004 and 2017, almost quadrupling their share of world exports. This extraordinary success story is a puzzling case that cannot be straightforwardly explained by economic factors, since Türkiye is not known for having the lowest labour costs, highest access to financial resources or most advanced technologies in construction. To complement and extend the established approaches in the literature, this thesis examines social determinants of competitive advantage by building on arguments from institutionalist and network-based schools of thought and employing a nested mixed-methods comparative case study research design. The findings indicate that social determinants matter for creation of competitive advantage when considered in distinct configurations across different contexts and complement selected dimensions of Michael Porter’s (1990) National Diamond. Rather than consciously calculating demand, Turkish contractors extensively rely on signals from networks as proposed by Harrison White (1981, 2002), as well as institutional signals sourced from political, regulatory and cultural structures. They thrive in objectively bad institutional environments, by capitalizing on institutional similarities, mobilizing political ties and influences, adapting to local cultural conditions, and taking excessive risks. Their internationalisation performance significantly depends on interactions of institutional and interpersonal complementarities in host countries. The contributions of this thesis are fourfold. First, it adds substantially to the empirical body of knowledge by solving a real-life puzzle of extraordinary international growth of a national industry. Second, it develops a nuanced and testable framework for the sociology of competitive advantage. Third, it bridges different theoretical ideas from economic sociology, political economy and international business literatures, while extending theoretical arguments with new conceptual discoveries. Finally, it comparatively demonstrates advantages and disadvantages of using different methods in competitiveness research, as the first study that systematically applies regression, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and thematic qualitative content analysis techniques

Essays on the relationship between unemployment and worklessness across the life course and cardiovascular disease risk factors in the United Kingdom

In this thesis I adopt a life course perspective to investigate whether and how experiences of unemployment and worklessness at different life stages are associated with various risk factors for cardiovascular diseases (CVD): mental health, hypertension and sleep. In three empirical chapters, I use methods such as fixed effects and structural equation modelling to account for endogeneity between unemployment and health, to explore the mechanisms through which unemployment may shape CVD risk factors, and whether any effects differ for population sub-groups. I show, first, that parental worklessness in adolescence (age 14) is associated with better psychological functioning for the UK-born population at ages 30 and above. This is potentially due to the increased attention parents can pay to their offspring during times of job loss; however, no significant relationship is shown for immigrants. Second, long-term (>1 year) youth unemployment at ages 16-24 is linked with higher hypertension risk at ages 30 and above. Both studies showed “scarring” effects, with unemployment exposure in adolescence and early adulthood having adverse consequences for later-in-life employment status and unhealthy behaviours such as smoking, which themselves negatively influence other CVD risk factors. Third, unemployment at ages 18-64 years is linked to poorer quality sleep and longer sleep duration for men but not women, nor those in a low-income household. Cross-cutting results emphasize that unemployment is processed differently according to other life circumstances, which moderate or augment subsequent effects on health. Mixed evidence was found in support of various life course models. Firstly, emerging adulthood was found to be a “sensitive period” in which exposure to youth unemployment has long-run, adverse effects on health. Yet, parental worklessness had no direct effects on mental health for immigrants and was linked to improved mental health for the UK-born. Scarring effects from exposure to both parental worklessness and youth unemployment were, however, found, with people set on a life course trajectory of disadvantage (through a “chains of risk” effect) that negatively shapes CVD risk factors. “Accumulation” of disadvantage across the life course was not shown for those exposed to parental worklessness or those experiencing youth unemployment. While I cannot conclusively prove mechanisms through which unemployment impacts CVD risk factors, it appears that the stress and psychological strain of unemployment may influence health status over and above the consequences of income losses. However, unemployment benefits may be partially protective against income loss associated with unemployment and its potential impacts. Overall, this PhD highlights the need for policymakers to consider the health effects of social protection measures such as unemployment benefits when costing and making policy decisions. The design of policy interventions to support the health and wellbeing of the unemployed should nevertheless be sensitive to differential responses among population sub-groups