Three Essays on Behavioral and Experimental Economics

The focus of this dissertation is to understand how mental rules of thumb, cognitive biases, and individual differences can lead judgments and decisions to systematically deviate from the theoretical “optimal” choices. The first essay examines how a decision-maker’s subjective belief is determined by her risk preference in a coordination game. We conduct a laboratory experiment where the participants played a repeated, fixed-partner stag-hunt game. In the experiment, we elicited the participants’ subjective belief, risk aversion and cautiousness levels. Here, we confirm the findings from past studies that suggest that the traditional measure of risk aversion in economics cannot explain people’s behavior. Additionally, we find that the psychological concept of cautiousness plays a key role in determining the origin and the evolution of the decision-maker’s belief. Specifically, we find that cautiousness affects the way people form the mental representation of their partners. A decision-maker with a higher cautiousness level is less likely to believe that her partner will choose the risky option. When the stag-hunt game was played repeatedly, a high cautiousness level prevents the decision-maker from updating her belief effectively, and consequently impedes cooperation between the players. The second essay proposes and experimentally tests the hypothesis that cognitive dissonance associated with the context plays a key role in determining people’s decisions in economic experiments. We conduct a laboratory bribery game experiment where the cognitive dissonance levels are controlled using different treatments (familiar-context treatment, unfamiliar-context treatment, and context-free treatment). With the aid of an independent attitude survey, we find that people in the unfamiliar-context treatment and the context-free treatment experience the same cognitive dissonance level; meanwhile, we do not observe different behavior in the lab. We also find the familiar-context treatment triggers the most intensive cognitive dissonance level among all treatments where the subjects are much less likely to behave unethically. Our theory is able to unify the mixed results from past studies on the experimental context effects. In the third essay, using a unique data set from a sample of recent local college graduates in China, we investigate the effect of agreeableness on the respondents’ starting salary and perceived career satisfaction level. Results from our analyses indicates that agreeableness positively predict women’s starting salary. This effect is highly robust to change in model specifications. However, agreeableness does not impact the men’s starting salary. Our result here suggests that non-cognitive ability (such as personality traits) plays a vital role in determining labor market outcome. In addition, we find that agreeableness positively related with subjective job satisfaction level. But this result is not robust to changes in model specifications. When we add the respondents’ major as a control variable, the effect of agreeableness on job-satisfaction becomes negligible and not statistically significant. This result might suggest a self-sorted story when choosing major. Further examination is required to explore this possibility

Effects of reactive gradient term in a multi-nonlinear parabolic problem

AbstractThis paper deals with parabolic equation ut=Δu+|∇u|r−aepu subject to nonlinear boundary flux ∂u/∂η=equ, where r>1, p,q,a>0. There are two positive sources (the gradient reaction and the boundary flux) and a negative one (the absorption) in the model. It is well known that blow-up or not of solutions depends on which one dominating the model, the positive or negative sources, and furthermore on the absorption coefficient for the balance case of them. The aim of the paper is to study the influence of the reactive gradient term on the asymptotic behavior of solutions. We at first determine the critical blow-up exponent, and then obtain the blow-up rate, the blow-up set as well as the spatial blow-up profile for blow-up solutions in the one-dimensional case. It turns out that the gradient term makes a substantial contribution to the formation of blow-up if and only if r⩾2, where the critical r=2 is such a balance situation of the two positive sources for which the effects of the gradient reaction and the boundary source are at the same level. In addition, it is observed that the gradient term with r>2 significantly affects the blow-up rate also. In fact, the gained blow-up rates themselves contain the exponent r of the gradient term. Moreover, the blow-up rate may be discontinuous with respect to parameters included in the problem due to convection. As for the influence of gradient perturbations on spatial blow-up profiles, we only need some coefficients related to r for the profile estimates, while the exponent of the profile itself is r-independent. This seems natural for boundary blow-up solutions that the spatial profiles mainly rely on the exponent of the boundary singularity

Conformal perturbations of dirac operators and general Kastler-Kalau-Walze type theorems for even dimensional manifolds with boundary

In this paper, we establish the proof of general Kastler-Kalau-Walze type theorems for conformal perturbations of dirac Operators on even dimensional compact manifolds with (respectively without) boundary.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2310.09775; text overlap with arXiv:2111.1503

CloudJet4BigData: Streamlining Big Data via an Accelerated Socket Interface

Big data needs to feed users with fresh processing results and cloud platforms can be used to speed up big data applications. This paper describes a new data communication protocol (CloudJet) for long distance and large volume big data accessing operations to alleviate the large latencies encountered in sharing big data resources in the clouds. It encapsulates a dynamic multi-stream/multi-path engine at the socket level, which conforms to Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) and thereby can accelerate any POSIX-compatible applications across IP based networks. It was demonstrated that CloudJet accelerates typical big data applications such as very large database (VLDB), data mining, media streaming and office applications by up to tenfold in real-world tests

A CAD/CAM wideband microwave six-port junction

ABSTRACT: Automatic network analysers -- Six-port reflectometry -- Six-port measurement technique -- Analysis of a six-port reflectometer -- Design Criterion of a six-port junction -- Measurement accuracy estimation -- Design of the wideband six-port junction -- Configuration of the six-port junction -- Directional coupler designs and measurements -- Designs and measurement of power dividers -- The complete integrated six-port junction -- Calibration of six-port reflectometers -- Calibration of the wide-band six-port reflectometer -- Calculation of qi Points