School Library/Media Supervision in State Agencies

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Experimental Economics

Experimental economics is a general term for the experimental laboratory approach to studying economic institutions. Most applied economists study economic institutions by observing the way in which they operate in the naturally occurring environment and by measuring such economic variables as the prices of good sand services, the quantities of goods and services that are bought and sold, the wages that are paid to workers, and the quantities of inputs and outputs in the production of goods and services

Introduction: What have we Learned about Academic Leadership

When Bob Sternberg embarked on this project in May of 2013, I was nearing the end of a year\u27s administrative leave after stepping down from my fifth major administrative position, an administrative career spanning twenty-three years. My latest position was a five-year term s executive vice president and provost at Iowa State University. I had been one of the Big XII provosts who formed the original set of contributors to this important book

Pre-play Learning and the Preference Reversal Phenomenon

Elicited preference rankings for two lotteries are typically inconsistent in choice and price. We test whether pre-play learning makes preference rankings consistent. Pre-play learning denotes ex-ante lottery learning, where subjects observe playing lotteries before making decisions. We find that pre-play learning makes the average selling prices for the p-bet, of subjects who choose the p-bet, higher than their average selling prices for the $-bet. However, pre-play learning is not strong enough to equalize the rates of standard and non-standard reversals, although pre-play learning reduces the rate of standard reversals

Willingness-To-Pay vs. Willingness-To-Accept: Legal and Economic Implications,

Do people value commodities more when they own the commodities than when they do not? Although economic models generally presume that economic agents evaluate commodities independently of whether the agents own those commodities--the basic independence assumption researchers in economics and law are starting to doubt whether this assumption is true. Doubts about the soundness of the basic independence assumption challenge accepted economic doctrines. Most theoretical and applied models in economics use the basic independence assumption both to predict and to assess the operation of markets. In the relatively new discipline that combines law and economics, the basic independence assumption produces the Coase Theorem, which is the starting point for much economic analysis of legal rules

How much you talk matters: cheap talk and collusion in a Bertrand oligopoly game

This study investigates the impact of cheap talk on price in a repeated Bertrand oligopoly experiment. Each participant plays 20 rounds. Participants are placed in three-person bidding groups where the lowest bid wins. During the first 10 rounds, participants are not allowed to communicate with each other. All three-person groups converged to the zero-profit equilibrium in the first 10 periods. We then play another 10 rounds where participants can text with one another using an instant message system. Some groups were allowed to text before every round, some to text before every other round, some to text every third round, some to text every fourth round, and some to text only every fifth round. When texting is allowed, All groups attempt to collude to raise the price after being allowed to text, but the only groups who can maintain the higher price and converge over time to the joint-profit maximum are the groups who can text before every period. Hence, cheap talk is only effective when subjects can continuously monitor or converse

Information Security Policy Compliance

One of the most challenging problems modern firms face is that their weakest link in maintaining information security is the behavior of employees: clicking on phishing emails, telling friends and family private information, and searching for private information about themselves (Loch, Carr and Warkentin 1992). A survey conducted by the Computer Security Institute reported that the average monetary loss per incident was $288,618 and that 44% of those who responded to the survey reported insider security-related abuse, making it the second-most frequently occurring computer security incident (Richardson 2008). This paper uses a questionnaire from Hu, West and Smarandescu (2015) to test for the efficacy of different reward and punishment schemes in preventing insider security-related abuse. Hu et al.’s (2015) scenarios elicit from participants whether they would recommend violating company IT policies. Real monetary payments provide motivation.3 The results indicate that, if a company can detect abuses with some degree of certainty, the best strategy among those tested is to regularly reward individual employees with small rewards for complying with company policy and punish every detected violation. This recommendation contrasts with the existing literature, which focuses almost entirely on punishment for detected security breaches. This focus on punishment is referred to as General Deterrence Theory (Straub Jr 1990). The results in this paper suggest strongly that General Deterrence Theory does not provide an effective strategy for preventing security breaches

Contrast Effects in Investment and Financing Decisions

Contrast effects, a bias caused by a prior stimulus, has not been extensively studied in a financial context. This study develops an experimental design to examine whether contrast effects distort the risk attitudes of individuals under a choice-based elicitation procedure. We find that individuals exposed to a positive stimulus amplify risk-seeking in investment decisions as opposed to individuals exposed to a negative stimulus. However, individuals behave similarly in making financing decisions regardless of different economic stimuli, which could suggest that financing decisions require a high cognitive load. On average, individuals spent 4% more time and changed their answers 4% more often in making financing decisions than investment decisions. The results suggest financing decisions may require a higher mental effort, and provide robust evidence that contrast effects can lead to mistakes in investment decisions

The Use of Contingent Valuation Methodology in Natural Resource Damage Assessments: Legal Fact and Economic Fiction.

The creation of comprehensive statutory schemes for protection of the environment has required the legal system to focus on the definition problems associated with environmental goods and with the physical, tmeporal, and aesthetic considerations related to such goods. Clearly, the events of the twentieth century have taught us that individual physical components of the natural environment, such as streams, forests, wildlife, and biota, do not exist in isolation. Instead, these components are part of the interrelated environmental systems that may, in turn, impact other environmental systems. Likewise, damage to one or more of the components of a system can result in a loss to humans of these environmental goods or the Uses provided by the system