1,186 research outputs found
More order with less law: on contract enforcement, trust, and crowding
Most contracts, whether between voters and politicians or between house owners and contractors, are incomplete. âMore law,â it typically is assumed, increases the likelihood of contract performance by increasing the probability of enforcement and/or the cost of breach. We examine a contractual relationship in which the first mover has to decide whether she wants to enter a contract without knowing whether the second mover will perform. We analyze how contract enforceability affects individual performance for exogenous preferences. Then we apply a dynamic model of preference adaptation and find that economic incentives have a nonmonotonic effect on behavior. Individuals perform a contract when enforcement is strong or weak but not with medium enforcement probabilities: Trustworthiness is âcrowded inâ with weak and âcrowded outâ with medium enforcement. In a laboratory experiment we test our modelâs implications and find support for the crowding prediction. Our finding is in line with the recent work on the role of contract enforcement and trust in formerly Communist countries
âThough this be madness, yet there is method inât.â A counterfactual analysis of Richard Wagnerâs Tannhäuser
Much like Wagner himself, the eponymous hero of Tannhäuser treads a path of stark contrasts and
rapid swings. From Wartburg to the Venusberg and to the Vatican, the gifted bard transforms from
self-centered artist to seduced disciple, disillusioned devotee, hopeful lover, self-loathing pilgrim and
finally redeemed martyr. He tries everything and everything is trying. These contrasts reach a peak in
the operaâs central episode, the song contest at Wartburg. Tannhäuser has just been welcomed at the
court, received Elisabethâs favor and affection, and is ready to compete for the contestâs prize, one as
lofty as possibly the princessâ hand. Instead of securing his reintegration to Wartburg with a brilliant
performance, however, he spoils the event with insolent remarks and the exhibitionist disclosure of
his Venusberg experience. His behavior offends his peers, scandalizes the court, breaks Elisabethâs
heart, and brings him to the edge of death. Why would Tannhäuser sacrifice everything for nothing
Learning trust
We examine the effects of different forms of feedback information on the performance of markets that suffer from moral hazard problems due to sequential exchange. As orthodox theory would predict, we find that providing buyers with information about sellers' trading history boosts market performance. More surprisingly, this beneficial effect of incentives for reputation building is considerably enhanced if sellers, too, can observe other sellers' trading history. This suggests that two-sided market transparency is an important ingredient for the design of well-functioning markets that are prone to moral hazard
On beliefs and motives in Richard Wagner's Lohengrin
Once Wagnerâs most popular opera, Lohengrin has suffered scholarly neglect in the postwar
period. This essay reengages with the work from the novel perspective of game theory
analysis. Centering on Elsaâs breach of the Frageverbot, it offers a rigorous epistemological
study of the operaâs main characters. Against traditional interpretations of the heroineâs fatal
decision, we propose a complex and psychologically more satisfactory account. Elsa asks the
forbidden question because she needs to confirm Lohengrinâs belief in her innocence, a belief
that Ortrud successfully eroded in Act II. This novel interpretation reveals Elsa as a rational
individual, upgrades the dramatic significance of the Act I combat scene, and signals a
hermeneutic return to the heart of opera criticism, the drama itself
Half-Periodic Josephson Effect in an s-Wave Superconductor - Normal Metal -d-Wave Superconductor Junction
We predict that the Josephson current in a clean s-wave superconductor-normal
metal-d-wave superconductor junction is periodic in superconducting phase
difference with period instead of . The frequency of
non-stationary Josephson effect is correspondingly The
effect is due to coexistence in the normal layer of current carrying Andreev
levels with phase differences and Comment: 4 pages, REVTeX, 3 figure
Treatment Learning Causal Transformer for Noisy Image Classification
Current top-notch deep learning (DL) based vision models are primarily based
on exploring and exploiting the inherent correlations between training data
samples and their associated labels. However, a known practical challenge is
their degraded performance against "noisy" data, induced by different
circumstances such as spurious correlations, irrelevant contexts, domain shift,
and adversarial attacks. In this work, we incorporate this binary information
of "existence of noise" as treatment into image classification tasks to improve
prediction accuracy by jointly estimating their treatment effects. Motivated
from causal variational inference, we propose a transformer-based architecture,
Treatment Learning Causal Transformer (TLT), that uses a latent generative
model to estimate robust feature representations from current observational
input for noise image classification. Depending on the estimated noise level
(modeled as a binary treatment factor), TLT assigns the corresponding inference
network trained by the designed causal loss for prediction. We also create new
noisy image datasets incorporating a wide range of noise factors (e.g., object
masking, style transfer, and adversarial perturbation) for performance
benchmarking. The superior performance of TLT in noisy image classification is
further validated by several refutation evaluation metrics. As a by-product,
TLT also improves visual salience methods for perceiving noisy images.Comment: Accepted to IEEE WACV 2023. The first version was finished in May
201
A note on charitable giving by corporates and aristocrats: Evidence from a field experiment
Multiple sources of funding are becoming increasingly important for charitable organizations. Donations from corporate donors for example account for 25â35% of charitable income for the largest US charities, across charitable sectors. This note presents some tentative first evidence from a natural field experiment to shed light on how different types of potential donors: individuals, corporates and aristocratically titled individuals, respond to the same fundraising drive. Each donor type was randomly assigned to treatments varying in two dimensions: (i) whether information was conveyed about the existence of an anonymous lead donor, and (ii) how individual donations would be matched by the anonymous lead donor. We find that aristocrats are significantly more likely to respond and that corporates give significantly more than individuals. Treatment effects moreover suggest that (proportional) matching is to be avoided for corporate donors
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