The application of stimulus response techniques to the modelling of high intensity spray combustion chambers

Imperial Users onl

Three Essays on Unethical Behaviour and Deterrence Mechanisms in Contests

This thesis consists of three self-contained essays. We study undesirable behaviors such as cheating and self-sabotaging in contests in a laboratory environment. The rst paper proposes a new anti-doping policy. In a conditional superannuation scheme, athletes have to pay a certain fraction of their proceeds from sports into a fund from which they can draw only well after their careers and if they have never been caught doping. Theoretically, this fund has two important advantages over conventional anti-doping policies such as bans and nes. It does not lose its deterrence e ect when athletes approach the end of their careers (unlike bans), and it can deal with the widespread problem that drug cheats are often only found out much later when the detection technology has caught up with doping practices. We build a model of a dynamic sporting contest, implement it in the laboratory and compare the performance of our policy to that of traditional policies. Our policy compares favorably with respect to doping prevention and the quality of resulting sporting contests. In the second paper, we study a tournament that rewards not only winners but also losers with extremely bad performance, which creates an incentive for underdogs to under-perform deliberately. Such a contest scheme is often employed to improve the long term competitive balance. We design two treatments, with or without the leaderboard, to investigate whether social status can reduce this self-sabotaging behaviour. The leaderboard of all participants' ranked performance is used as a proxy of social status. Our results show that underdogs respond to the monetary self-sabotaging incentives in contests. In addition, individuals tend to self-sabotage just enough when the leaderboard is displayed to everybody. Without the leaderboard, players self-sabotage more excessively. We conjecture that by achieving exactly the level of performance that gives the consolation prize, tankers in the leaderboard treatment want to signal that they understand the game well and they tanked to receive the consolation prize. The third paper addresses an agency problem in a contest between two contestants, each with a manager. Individuals that are engaged in contests have strong incentives to cheat. Sanctions are designed to deter potential cheaters. Often other agents in the contestant's team (e.g., a coach of an athlete) or company (a manager of an R&D engineer) have a bene t from cheating and can in uence on the cheating decision. If only the contestant is punished for cheating, an agency problem arises. We show theoretically, that extending the liability from the contestant to the manager reduces cheating only if fines are suffciently high. Otherwise over-all cheating rate increases. Experimental tests confi rm that for high fines joint liability is effective in reducing cheating, while predicted detrimental effect of joint liability when fines are low does not materialise.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Economics, 201

Essays in Climatic Extremes, Agriculture and Natural Resources

The first part of this dissertation attempts to add to our understanding of two aspects of the climate change issue, using tools from two different disciplines: Economics and Hydro-Climatology, for the case of India. The two aspects addressed are :( 1) understanding and summarizing changes in the climate system (and systems driven by it, such as the hydrologic system) and (2) translating such an understanding into quantitative assessments of impacts upon different activities. Modifications of conventional approaches in Environmental Economics are used to obtain a quantitative understanding of the type of changes in agricultural productivity induced by probable scenarios of climate change. Using a newly available observational rainfall data set from the Meteorological Department, assessments are carried out of changes in extremes of rainfall. These putative changes are then assessed in relation to certain larger scale climatological phenomena which presumably impact hydrologic extremes, based on hypotheses presented in the literature. The second part of the dissertation addresses the issue of unified, coherent and more realistic analysis of groundwater-based models in the Economics literature

Albuquerque Morning Journal, 04-30-1918

https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/abq_mj_news/1300/thumbnail.jp

An economic enquiry into the welfare effects of fair-trade

PhDThe copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without the prior written consent of the author.Fair-trade is investigated at three levels. Each level relates to a specific group of actors. The first group are the consumers of fair-trade. In this respect fair-trade overlaps with altruism. A model is developed which seeks out parameters by which to judge whether or not a person will engage into this gesture of altruism, and accordingly measures the fair-trade utility of the consumer. On the basis that it is voluntary, fair-trade is deemed to be virtuous in that it either uplifts consumer utility, or else the consumer withdraws their patronage. Information is hypothesised to play a key role in determining the depth of this relationship. The second group are neighbouring producers, that is the non fair-trade producers who compete in the same market. A situation is modelled in which fair-trade is viewed as a switch in demand preference rather than new demand. The model allows an evaluation based on the standard tenets of welfare economics: to inform upon which movements are value-creating, which are merely transfers, the symmetry of those transfers and where Pareto improvements can and cannot be realised. The policymaker is afforded a logical overview, but with the implication that many of the relevant variables may be lie beyond their direct influence. The third group are landless vineyard labours in South Africa who are empirically analysised. We observed the strongest performance of fair-trade with respect to subjective improvement in wellbeing and the sort of participation that could be categorised as empowerment.Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC

The Tiger Vol. LII No. 6 - 1958-10-16

https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/tiger_newspaper/3770/thumbnail.jp