Learning Strategic Sophistication

We experimentally investigate coordination games in which cognition plays an important role, i.e. where outcomes are affected by the agents level of understanding of the game and the beliefs they form about each others understanding.We ask whether and when repeated exposure permits agents to learn to improve cognition in a strategic setting.We find evidence for strategic sophistication being learned, generalized and promoted.Agents acquire strategic sophistication in simple settings.They may fail to do so in similar but more demanding settings.Given the opportunity, they transfer learning from the simple to the more demanding task.There is heterogeneity in sophistication.We find some evidence for sophisticated agents trying to spread sophistication early in the game, provided there is a long enough time horizon.noncooperative games;laboratory group behavior

Cognition in Spatial Dispersion Games

In common-interest spatial-dispersion games the agents common goal is to choose distinct locations.We experimentally investigate the role of cognition in such games and compare it with the role of cognition in spatial matching games. In our setup cognition matters because agents may be differentially aware of the dispersion opportunities that are created by the history of the game.We ask whether cognitive constraints limit the agents ability to achieve dispersion and, if there is dispersion, whether these constraints affect the mode by which agents achieve dispersion.Our main finding is that strategic interaction magnifies the role of cognitive constraints.Specifically, with cognitive constraints, pairs of agents fail to solve a dispersion problem that poses little or no problem for individual agents playing against themselves.When we remove the cognitive constraints in our design, pairs of agents solve the same problem just as well as individuals do.In addition, we find that when playing against themselves agents do not change the mode by which they solve the dispersion problem when our design removes the cognitive constraints.noncooperative games;laboratory group behavior

Learning and Communication in Sender-Reciever Games: An Economic Investigation

This paper compares the performance of stimulus response (SR) and belief-based learning (BBL) using data from game theory experiments. The environment, extensive form games played in a population setting, is novel in the empirical literature on learning in games. Both the SR and BBL models fit the data reasonably well in common interest games with history while the test results accept SR and reject BBL in games with no history and in all but one of the divergent interest games. Estimation is challenging since the likelihood function is not globally concave and the results may be subject to convergence bias.econometrics;game theory and experiments

Feeling With Imagination: Sympathy and Postwar American Poetry

This dissertation examines how sympathy, defined as the act of “feeling with” another, develops within American poetics from 1950-1965 both as aesthetic strategy and as political response to Cold War culture. Re-examining the social aims of postwar poets typically either thought of as apolitical or yoked to political positions not in fact evidenced by their poems, I argue that these poets, by developing forms of sympathy that negotiate the middle space between the aesthetic conventions of late modernist poetry and the social concerns of postwar American culture, instantiate a self-questioning, often implicit form of “soft politics” that both prefigures and creates the conditions for the more openly political aesthetic of the 1960s. The dissertation is divided into three parts, each of which examines two poets. The first section focuses on Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, analyzing their work in light of the affect theory first developed by the psychologist Silvan Tomkins to show how their poems invite and deconstruct the sharing of various forms of feeling between reader, speaker, and subject. I then examine the work of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, who use sympathy to fashion a radically unfinished model of selfhood that both anticipates and interrogates poststructuralist conceptions of subjectivity. The final section of my dissertation reads the work of the late modernist African-American poets Robert Hayden and Melvin Tolson in the context of theorists including Frantz Fanon and Mikhail Bakhtin, demonstrating that their poems embody, by their global and sympathetic perspective, the attempt to forge of ties of sympathy between individuals separated by distance, race, gender, and history. Using an interdisciplinary methodology that combines affect theory with historicist and formalist critique, I provide an original and important reading of mid-century U.S. poetics as defined by a radical ethics rooted in forms of shared feeling. Illuminating the soft politics of late modernist poetry, this thesis complicates the current picture of the postwar arts by arguing that it is attuned not only to the psychology of the solitary or alienated self, but to the ways in which bonds of sympathy between disparate persons can transform conceptual models of individual, community, and nation

Royal Ahold: A Failure of Corporate Governance and an Accounting Scandal

Royal Ahold (Koninklijke Ahold NV) was one of the major success stories in the 1990s and is one of the major failures, suffering a complete meltdown, in 2003.We investigate the strategy, accounting transparency and corporate governance of Ahold; elements which jointly drive the firm s performance over this period of time.In general, the corporate governance, accounting transparency, strategy and firm performance relationships are complex.There is not a fully specified model available to address the inter-relationships, including the endogeneity problem.The econometrics are difficult and constrained not only by the lack of a fully specified theory but also by data availability. Our clinical study overcomes these problems by providing an in-depth analysis of the inter-relationships among corporate governance, accounting transparency and strategy that lead to Ahold s downfall.We provide insights into these relationships and their complexity that present theory and empirical studies cannot address.international economics;financial economics;financial reporting;law and economics;corporate governance;regulation

Body mass index and sociodemographic predictors of school lunch purchase behavior during a year-long environmental intervention in middle school

Modifying the school food environment is on the national agenda as one strategy to improve the nutritional quality of children's diets. Because few environmental-level interventions have been rigorously evaluated, the evidence base to inform programs and policies is limited. Of concern is the impact that changes to cafeteria offerings will have on participation in school meal programs. This study evaluates school lunch participation in the setting of a year-long middle school cafeteria intervention by examining the association between body mass index (BMI), sociodemographics, and the purchases of school lunch meals. IMOVE meals were healthier choices that met stringent nutritional criteria and were offered alongside standard lunch meals. Students who were overweight had a significantly higher purchase rate for both types of meals compared to those with a healthy BMI. Non-white race, younger age, being male, and low-income status were also significantly associated with participation in school lunch. Results indicate that nutritionally vulnerable students participate in school lunch and are equally likely to buy healthy alternatives or standard meals. This behavioral observation has important implications for school foodservice programs and policies. These results are timely given recent federal legislation to improve the school food environment to influence students' food choice behaviors

The Role of Self-Regulation in Corporate Governance: Evidence from the Netherlands

The purpose of this paper is to gather evidence on the success of market forces in promoting investor interests through self-regulation.Corporate governance is a complex mechanism design problem that is both economic and legal/political based.As such there is great interest in whether (and when) market forces alone are sufficient to prompt change, and whether (and when) additional legal/political actions are required to write and enforce contracts between the owners and managers of capital.The Netherlands provides an excellent opportunity to gather such information.In 1996, a private sector Committee was formed to initiate debate and change in the balance of power between a company's management and investors.In 1997, the Committee issued its recommendations and one year later the Committee initiated a project to assess the impact of the report.We identify the corporate governance variables that are linked to firm value and assess the impact of the committee's recommendations on the identified variables.Finally, we use event study techniques to assess investors reactions to the various events associated with the evolution of corporate governance practices in the Netherlands during this period.international economics;financial economics;law and economics;corporate governance

Learning to integrate reactivity and deliberation in uncertain planning and scheduling problems

This paper describes an approach to planning and scheduling in uncertain domains. In this approach, a system divides a task on a goal by goal basis into reactive and deliberative components. Initially, a task is handled entirely reactively. When failures occur, the system changes the reactive/deliverative goal division by moving goals into the deliberative component. Because our approach attempts to minimize the number of deliberative goals, we call our approach Minimal Deliberation (MD). Because MD allows goals to be treated reactively, it gains some of the advantages of reactive systems: computational efficiency, the ability to deal with noise and non-deterministic effects, and the ability to take advantage of unforseen opportunities. However, because MD can fall back upon deliberation, it can also provide some of the guarantees of classical planning, such as the ability to deal with complex goal interactions. This paper describes the Minimal Deliberation approach to integrating reactivity and deliberation and describe an ongoing application of the approach to an uncertain planning and scheduling domain

The Role of Self-Regulation in Corporate Governance

This paper assesses the effectiveness of self-regulation to promote investor interests. TheNetherlands provides an excellent opportunity to gather such evidence for two reasons. First,characteristics of the Dutch corporate governance structure have made it the recent focus ofattention by the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and countries (e.g., Korea)when deliberating issues of corporate governance. Second, during the period 1996-1998, aprivate sector initiative was undertaken to promote change in the balance of power betweenmanagement and investors. Not surprisingly, the United States Securities and ExchangeCommission has closely followed the Dutch "experiment" in self-regulation. We begin byidentifying corporate governance characteristics that are linked to firm value. We thencompare corporate governance characteristics and the relation between firm value and thesecharacteristics before and after the private sector initiative. We find that therecommendations of the private sector initiative had no substantive effect on corporategovernance characteristics or their relationship with firm value. Using event study techniqueswe document the market's skepticism about the successful evolution of corporate governancepractices in the Netherlands through self-regulation. The one exception to this generalconclusion is the market for new listings. Overall, our results confirm the importance ofshareholder voting rights, and who controls these rights, when considering the design of asuccessful self-regulation process.corporate governance;law and economics;financial economics;International economics