Detecting and Correcting Election Fraud

I examine the provision of free and fair elections using a decision-theoretic model in which election observers provide a noisy information signal concerning fraud. Monitoring an election is not always worth the cost and so democracy is not always sustainable. A strong preference for fair elections can paradoxically make elections more difficult to monitor. Since fair elections are a public good, municipal election fraud result from Tiebout provision of this local public good. I offer several suggestions for organizations interested in facilitating the diffusion of democracy.Democracy; Election

Learning by Doing: Understanding the Role of Affordance Informativity in Information Search Performance

Information search is becoming increasingly demanding due to the booming of Consumer Generated Content (CGC) in online environment. This has led to growing scholarly interest in designing search features to accommodate diverse user preferences. Drawing on the Theory of Affordance Informativity, we advance ostensive informativity and performative informativity as focal mechanisms for search features to convey actions afforded to users. We further put forth a typology of search features that is grounded in both dimensions of search affordance informativities. Next, we construct a research framework that depicts how search affordance informativity bolsters information search performance. By conducting a field experiment on our custom-made online restaurant review website, we discovered that performative informativity increases search result anticipation and reduces search costs whereas ostensive informativity only facilitates the former. Search result anticipation in turn enhances search performance in terms of efficiency and utility, but the opposite effect is observed for search costs

Two Essays on the Microstructure of the Housing Market: Agents\u27 Diffused Effort and Sellers\u27 Behavior Bias

For the first essay, we generalize the classic Williams [1998 RFS] brokerage model by introducing the diffused effort. That is, the agent can cross-utilize effort spending on one listing to another one. Besides, the agent can manage heterogeneous housing assets. One counterintuitive finding in Williams’ paper is the absence of the agency problem. As a special case in our model, we recover the agency problem. We examine the positive externality due to the diffused effort and show that it depends on the agent’s inventory size. Hence there exists a trade-off between agents’ effort spending on existing listings and on finding a new listing. For the second essay, we model a home seller’s pricing decision under a generally defined prospect value function. We show a simple disposition effect is caused by reference dependence, but it only exists when the agent is risk neutral. Diminishing sensitivity will lead to a two-way disposition effect by generating a local reverse disposition effect, a range in which the seller’s asking price decreases with increasing potential loss. Loss aversion tends to magnify the disposition effect and hence mitigates the reverse disposition effect. One direct implication is that acclaimed tests on loss aversion such as Genesove and Mayer [2001] and Pope and Schweitzer [2011] are likely invalid. We present evidence consistent with the model by using multiple listing service data from Virginia. Our findings suggest that studies which predominantly focus on a one-way disposition effect can be overly simplistic and misleading as it depends on the strong assumption of risk neutrality

The Value of Knowing When to Switch: Investigating the Interaction of Value and Control

Decisions often happen in sequence, but research in decision making tends to analyze the factors that influence decisions in isolation. A novel methodology – reward-based voluntary task switching (rVTS) – is introduced to investigate how reward, effort, and the representation of task interact with each other to influence successive task selections in a task switching environment. The present research also investigates whether the value associated with a task is integrated into the task-set representation that is used to execute a task, or whether task value is held in a separate representation altogether. Results from the present experiments suggest that people are sensitive to the amount of effort required to perform a task, and that the value of a task is not integrated into the representation of the task itself. It is possible that task value is stored in a separate representation that interacts with the representation of task to influence task selections

Tacit knowledge and the biological weapons regime

Bioterrorism has become increasingly salient in security discourse in part because of perceived changes in the capacity and geography of life science research. Yet its salience is founded upon a framing of changes in science and security that does not always take into consideration the somewhat slippery concept of ‘tacit knowledge’, something poorly understood, disparately conceptualised and often marginalised in discussions on state and non-state biological weapons programmes. This paper looks at how changes in science and technology—particularly the evolution of information and communications technology—has contributed to the partial erosion of aspects of tacit knowledge and the implications for the biological weapons regime. This paper concludes by arguing that the marginalisation of tacit knowledge weakens our understanding of the difficulties encountered in biological weapons programmes and can result in distorted perceptions of the threat posed by dual-use biotechnology in the 21st century