Impact of Sexuality on the Ultimatum Game

This project focuses on the ultimatum game—an experiment done by many economists to determine levels of altruism, fairness, equality, and financial responsibility individuals possess. It involves two players bargaining over a sum of money and is often used as a proxy for how people manage their income, negotiate for salaries, or think about fairness. Many identities have been tested, such as age, race, and gender, and while differences have been found based on gender, nobody has controlled the study for sexuality. The goal of this study was to determine whether sexuality has an impact on the results of the ultimatum game specifically by comparing gay and straight men. A total of 18 gay men and 30 straight men participated in this game. I analyzed the means of each group’s data points using t-tests and ran two regressions with variables collected in the demographic survey; ultimately, there was little difference in offers made or minimum acceptance thresholds based on sexuality. Therefore, it is impossible to reject the hypothesis that there is no significant difference between the way in which straight and gay males play the ultimatum game. The results suggest that gay and straight men do not act differently when given the prompts of this game, thus they may make similar financial decisions and bargaining choices

Multilevel coarse graining and nano--pattern discovery in many particle stochastic systems

In this work we propose a hierarchy of Monte Carlo methods for sampling equilibrium properties of stochastic lattice systems with competing short and long range interactions. Each Monte Carlo step is composed by two or more sub - steps efficiently coupling coarse and microscopic state spaces. The method can be designed to sample the exact or controlled-error approximations of the target distribution, providing information on levels of different resolutions, as well as at the microscopic level. In both strategies the method achieves significant reduction of the computational cost compared to conventional Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. Applications in phase transition and pattern formation problems confirm the efficiency of the proposed methods.Comment: 37 page