Altruistic behavior and soccer:the effect of incidental happiness on charitable giving

This study investigates the impact of incidental happiness associated with the outcome of the Dutch national soccer championship on charitable giving shortly after the decisive match. We use survey data in which participants were asked to make an anonymous donation of an earned endowment. For estimating the causal effect of happiness on charitable giving, we exploit the variation in the emotions of fans between and within teams using two complementary empirical approaches. The first approach is based on the preference of fans for local teams. We find that individuals living closer to the city of the new champions (Amsterdam) are happier and also more likely to donate to charity than individuals living further away. Importantly, distance to Amsterdam does not affect charitable giving in a placebo sample of individuals with no interest in soccer. The second approach exploits variation between different types of fans within teams. Allegiant fans, individuals who attended a match, are happier and more likely to donate to charity than “stay-at-home” fans when their team wins the title. Allegiant fans are less happy and less likely to donate than stay-at-home fans when their team does not win the title. Instrumental variable estimates suggest a large effect of incidental happiness on charitable giving

Board cultural diversity and firm performance under competitive pressures

We examine the impact of board cultural diversity, based on directors' ancestry, on firm performance conditional on product market competition. We argue that culturally diverse boards foster critical thinking and offer creative solutions that help firms thrive in competitive environments. We document that culturally diverse boards are associated with superior performance for firms operating in highly competitive industries. To address potential endogeneity issues, we use a quasi-natural experiment of the U.S. import tariff cuts. The positive impact of board cultural diversity on firm performance in competitive markets manifests itself in firms that innovate more, require creative inputs, and face heightened predation risk due to their high interdependence with industry rivals, in line with culturally diverse boards effectively performing their advisory role. Lastly, we find no evidence that board cultural diversity is associated with enhanced monitoring as its benefits fade in the presence of powerful CEOs

Branching pomsets:Design, expressiveness and applications to choreographies

Choreographic languages describe possible sequences of interactions among a set of agents. Typical models are based on languages or automata over sending and receiving actions. Pomsets provide a more compact alternative by using a partial order to explicitly represent causality and concurrency between these actions. However, pomsets offer no representation of choices, thus a set of pomsets is required to represent branching behaviour. For example, if an agent Alice can send one of two possible messages to Bob three times, one would need a set of 2 x 2 x 2 distinct pomsets to represent all possible branches of Alice's behaviour. This paper proposes an extension of pomsets, named branching pomsets, with a branching structure that can represent Alice's behaviour using 2 + 2 + 2 ordered actions. We compare the expressiveness of branching pomsets with that of several forms of event structures from the literature. We encode choreographies as branching pomsets and show that the pomset semantics of the encoded choreographies are bisimilar to their operational semantics. Furthermore, we define well-formedness conditions on branching pomsets, inspired by multiparty session types, and we prove that the well-formedness of a branching pomset is a sufficient condition for the realisability of the represented communication protocol. Finally, we present a prototype tool that implements our theory of branching pomsets, focusing on its applications to choreographies.</div