Regression Discontinuity Designs with an Endogenous Forcing Variable and an Application to Contracting in Health Care

Regression discontinuity designs (RDDs) are a popular method to estimate treatment effects. However, RDDs may fail to yield consistent estimates if the forcing variable can be manipulated by the agent. In this paper, we examine one interesting set of economic models with such a feature. Specifically, we examine the case where there is a structural relationship between the forcing variable and the outcome variable because they are determined simultaneously. We propose a modi…ed RDD estimator for such models and derive the conditions under which it is consistent. As an application of our method, we study contracts between a large managed care organization and leading hospitals for the provision of organ and tissue transplants. Exploiting "donut holes" in the reimbursement contracts we estimate how the total claims filed by the hospitals depend on the generosity of the reimbursement structure. Our results show that hospitals submit significantly larger bills when the reimbursement rate is higher, indicating informational asymmetries between the payer and hospitals in this market.

Internalization of Information Security Policy and Information Security Practice: A Comparison with Compliance

Most recent information security incidents have been caused by employees’ poor managements rather than technology defects. Accordingly, organizations try to improve their information security by demanding that employees conform to information security policies. Previous studies examined the effect of organization’s enforcement-based systems, using penalties and rewards, on employees’ comply with information security policies. It found there is a lack of autonomy and sustainability if conformity depended on external environmental factors. To confirm, following social influence theory, that employees’ information security practices can be better performed if they go beyond compliance and are internalized, we developed an instrument that measures employees’ attitudes on information security policies and conducted a pilot test. The results show that information security practices are performed better by the higher internalization group than by the compliance group, proving the greater effectiveness of internalization in improving both employees’ and organizations’ information security

The Effect of Information Asymmetry on Investment Behavior in Cryptocurrency Market

With the increase in the attention to cryptocurrency, studies on the factors affecting the price fluctuation of cryptocurrency have been actively conducted. Prior researches suggested that policy announcements (i.e., public information) related to cryptocurrency have been found to affect the price volatility in the market in particular. Privileged information, which is hard to be observable unlike public information published by the government or corporations, is hardly homogenously distributed to individual investors. However, it inevitably affects the price in any market. Therefore, this study aims to identify the information asymmetry, which is mainly formed by privileged information, in the cryptocurrency market. Moreover, this study examines whether investment sentiment, which mainly influences transaction behaviors of uninformed traders, has a significant effect on the cryptocurrency market as well. The results contribute to the understanding of the cryptocurrency market in a basis of the existing market theories

The Joint Effect of Self-Monitoring and Self-Ideal Discrepancy on Consumer Attitude toward Luxury Fashion Brands

The purpose of this study was to investigate the joint effect of self-monitoring and self-ideal discrepancy on consumer attitude toward luxury fashion brands. Participants (n = 316) who have purchased a luxury fashion brand within the past three years were recruited from a marketing research company and completed an online questionnaire. The results of this study provide empirical evidence that high self-monitors have more positive attitude toward luxury fashion brands when their actual self is close to ideal self in terms of self-efficacy, economic well-being, and experiential well-being. For managers to effectively design and implement luxury fashion branding strategies for high self-monitors who are inherently conspicuous, our findings suggest that they should convey such messages as self-efficacy, economic well-being, and experiential well-being

Regular Time-series Generation using SGM

Score-based generative models (SGMs) are generative models that are in the spotlight these days. Time-series frequently occurs in our daily life, e.g., stock data, climate data, and so on. Especially, time-series forecasting and classification are popular research topics in the field of machine learning. SGMs are also known for outperforming other generative models. As a result, we apply SGMs to synthesize time-series data by learning conditional score functions. We propose a conditional score network for the time-series generation domain. Furthermore, we also derive the loss function between the score matching and the denoising score matching in the time-series generation domain. Finally, we achieve state-of-the-art results on real-world datasets in terms of sampling diversity and quality.Comment: 9 pages, appendix 3 pages, under revie

When Social Media Backfires: The Impact of Psychological Distance on Perceived Values and Desirability of Luxury Brands

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. July 2018. Major: Design, Housing and Apparel. Advisors: Hyunjoo Im, Hye-Young Kim. 1 computer file (PDF); viii, 115 pages.This research focused on examining the impact of psychological distance of luxury brands prompted by various social media marketing tactics on perceived values and desirability of luxury brands within the context of social media marketing. The first research objective was to identify the determinants of psychological distance of luxury brands (i.e., consumer engagement strategy, formality of engagement, and message response time). The second research objective was to assess the impact of psychological distance on perceived values (i.e., social, exclusive, and quality values) and desirability of luxury brands. The last objective was to examine the interaction effect between psychological distance and consumers’ need for status to identify boundary conditions. To fulfill these research objectives, three pilot studies and three experimental studies were conducted. The result of Study 1 demonstrated that a luxury brand with a high level of consumer engagement is perceived to be psychologically close, and such a psychologically close brand was perceived to have lower social and exclusive values. The mediation analysis revealed that psychological distance was a full mediator for the relationships. Also, the results showed that there were interaction effects between psychological distance and need for status on perceived exclusive value and desirability. However, contrary to the prediction, the effect of psychological distance was pronounced for the low need for status group, not for the high need for status group. The results of Study 2 showed that a luxury brand displaying casual engagements with consumers was perceived as less psychologically distant, as it was predicted. However, there were no main effect of psychological distance and interaction effect between psychological distance and need for status. Study 3 demonstrated that when the luxury brand’s response time is shorter, it was perceived to be less psychologically distant. However, contrary to the prediction, the psychologically close luxury brand was perceived to have higher exclusive and quality values. Discussions of the findings, theoretical and practical implications, and limitations and suggestions for future research were provided