Retirees Look Back on the Years

Professors Howard Leichter, Linda Olds and Kareen Sturgeon share memories of their years at Linfield

Someone please, tell me: Was this Sexual Assault?

Prose by Kareen Casillas. *Author’s Note: Please take care of yourself when reading the following piece, as it may be triggering. Contains images of sexual assault

Back Matter

Includes designer\u27s note and contributors

A ‘Dual’-Improved Shortcut to the Long Run

I use the theories of duality and optimal branchings to find a necessary and sufficient characterization of stochastically stable limit sets (SSLS) that helps improve the radius -- modified coradius test of Ellison (2000). The improved shortcut I offer may permit the identification of SSLS when Ellison’s radius -- modified coradius test fails to identify any, or may be able to pinpoint the true SSLS in cases where Ellison’s test identifies only a superset. I also demonstrate precisely why the radius -- modified coradius test is not universally applicable and illuminate the connection between the modified coradius and the Lagrange multipliers of the optimal branching problem.Evolutionary games, Stochastic stability, Optimal branchings, Extended radius, Extended coradius, Modified coradius

Celebrating Linfield\u27s Birthday

The founders of Linfield College might be astounded at all the changes over the last 150 years

Conflict Leads to Cooperation in Nash Bargaining

We consider a multilateral Nash demand game where short-sighted players come to the bargaining table with requests for both coalition partners and the potentially generated resource. We prove that group learning leads with probability one to complete cooperation and a strictly self-enforcing allocation (i.e., in the interior of the core). Highlighting group dynamics, we demonstrate that behaviors which appear destructive can themselves lead to beneficial and strictly self-enforcing cooperation.Nash bargaining, Learning, Core, Group conflict

History-Dependent Risk Attitude

We propose a model of history-dependent risk attitude (HDRA), allowing the attitude of a decision-maker (DM) towards risk at each stage of a T-stage lottery to evolve as a function of his history of disappointments and elations in prior stages. We establish an equivalence between the existence of an HDRA representation and two documented cognitive biases. First, the DM’s risk attitudes are reinforced by prior experiences: he becomes more risk averse after suffering a disappointment and less risk averse after being elated. Second, the DM displays a primacy effect: early outcomes have the strongest effect on risk attitude. Furthermore, the DM lowers his threshold for elation after a disappointing outcome and raises it after an elating outcome; this makes disappointment more likely after elation and vice-versa, leading to statistically reversing risk attitudes. “Gray areas” in the elation-disappointment assignment are connected to optimism and pessimism in determining endogenous reference points.history-dependent risk attitude, statistically reversing risk attitudes, reinforcement effect, primacy effect, endogenous reference dependence, betweenness, optimism, pessimism

Disappointment Cycles

We propose a model of history dependent disappointment aversion (HDDA), allowing the attitude of a decision-maker (DM) towards disappointment at each stage of a T-stage lottery to evolve as a function of his history of disappointments and elations in prior stages. We establish an equivalence between the existence of an HDDA representation and two documented cognitive biases. First, the DM overreacts to news: after suffering a disappointment, the DM lowers his threshold for elation and becomes more risk averse; similarly, after an elating outcome, the DM raises his threshold for elation and becomes less risk averse. This makes disappointment more likely after elation and vice-versa, leading to statistically cycling risk attitudes. Second, the DM displays a primacy effect: early outcomes have the strongest effect on risk attitude. “Gray areas” in the elation-disappointment assignment are connected to optimism and pessimism in determining endogenous reference points.history dependent disappointment aversion, disappointment cycles, overreaction to news, primacy effect, endogenous reference dependence, optimism, pessimism