Category Reporting in Charitable Giving: An Experimental Analysis

Harbaugh (1998a) has shown theoretically that charities can increase the size of donations by publicly acknowledging their donors using categories. In a complementary paper,using the data on the donations given by 146 lawyers to their almamater law school, Harbaugh (1998b) provided empirical support for this theoretical assertion. Essentially, being acknowledged in categories gives donors some prestige benefits. In this paper, we experimentally investigate the impact of various reporting plans as described in Harbaugh (1998a and 1998b) on the behavior of donors. Our results show that, although the category reporting plan has no significant impact on the size of donations when compared to the exact reporting plan and the no reporting plan, it does signi�ficantly alter the charitable behavior of donors. We show that the presence of a category reporting plan induces the clustering of donations on the lower boundaries of categories, which suggests that donors are motivated by prestige. We also discover that in some circumstances the presence of prestige benefi�ts crowds out the warm glow motive for giving

The Wordline Effective Field Theory of Spinning Gravitational Sources

The advent of gravitational wave physics has raised great interest in efficient calculations of gravitational dynamics. In particular, the worldline effective field theory (EFT) has proven to be powerful for describing the dynamics of compact binary inspirals. In this thesis, we report on progress in this method on including rotating gravitational sources. It has been shown that a connection exists between the radiative amplitudes from spinless classical sources in Yang-Mills theory and dilaton-gravity theory, inspired by the double copy construction in the scattering amplitude community. We generalize this result to spinning sources and find that an additional axion channel is necessary for the connection to be established. The spectrum coincides with that of the low energy limit of string gravity, and we deduce that the worldline EFTs correspond to the low energy limit of classical string theories. Furthermore, we show that tidal effects also admit a double copy structure. On the other hand, there has been new progress on incorporating dissipative effects into the worldline EFT. We generalize this construction to describe rotating objects and apply it to describe the absorptive effects of Kerr black holes by matching with graviton absorption probabilities calculated by Teukolsky equations. Usingthe resulting EFT, we reproduce the correct mass and spin absorption rates under general backgrounds. We demonstrate the utility of this EFT by computing new results for the dissipative equation of motion and power transfer in non-relativistic black hole binaries, starting at 5 and 2.5 post-Newtonian orders respectively

Four Essays on the Economics of Pro-Social Behaviors

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Nitric Oxide Synthase in Male Urological and Andrologic Functions

Nitric oxide (NO), a crucial signaling molecule, is synthesized by the nitric oxide synthase (NOS) enzyme. The significant effects of NOS are under exploration, and the roles of potential therapy targets for diseases of NOS are widely accepted. In this chapter, we summarized the important roles of NOS mainly on pathogenesis of prostate diseases, male infertility, erectile dysfunction and, addition, the potential therapeutic efficacies of NOS for those diseases