Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 139-143).

The first chapter examines adolescent beauty as a potential originator of the observed wage premium for adult beauty and finds that adolescent beauty has its own separate effect on adult wages. Adolescent beauty also affects early human capital development, as evidenced by its significant impact on educational outcomes. Changes in beauty over time are shown to be positively correlated with changes in wages for full-time workers, and changes in beauty are generally not correlated with appearance-related choice variables. I explore the possibility that self-confidence and social capital are potential mechanisms through which adolescent attractiveness affects future wages but find that these do not change the magnitude of the effects of adolescent beauty, although they are of themselves significant determinants of wages. The second chapter examines the effects of personal grooming behaviors on earnings and shows evidence that these effects are due to persistent differences in preferences or productivity between workers displaying different grooming choices and not statistical discrimination on the part of employers. In a longitudinal sample of lawyers graduating from the same law school, men who wear glasses and men with facial hair face an earnings penalty in first-year income and to some extent in subsequent years. Some grooming behaviors are positively correlated with income in the 1970's cohort and negatively correlated with income in the 1980's cohort (and vice versa), suggesting that fashion signals change relatively quickly. I also find that grooming behaviors are correlated with beauty ratings and that the beauty premium is unaffected by earnings, but the estimated effects of some grooming behaviors partially result from their correlation with beauty. I do not find evidence that grooming behaviors act as a signaling mechanism in the labor market. The third chapter evaluates the claim that design piracy is beneficial to certain status-goods firms. It builds on Pesendorfer's model of fashion cycles by introducing the possibility of design imitation for a market in which designs are used as a signaling mechanism. There exist equilibria in which both the designer and imitator are active in the market, but there are no conditions under which imitation is profitable to the designer. Under some conditions the presence of a potential imitator will ensure that the designer does not produce at all. / text

Cooperative services--a term which includes any system that relies on the resources and participation of its clients to function--have proven to be a popular, naturally scalable means to disseminate content, distribute computational workloads, or provide network connectivity. However, because these services critically depend on participants that are not controlled by a single administrative domain, these services must be designed to function in environments where no participant--because of failure or selfishness--will necessarily follow the specified protocol. This thesis addresses the challenge of establishing and maintaining cooperation in cooperative services by (1) advancing our understanding of the limits to what our services can guarantee in the presence of failure, (2) demonstrating the critical role that correct participants can play in the incentives provided by the service, and (3) proposing a new notion of equilibrium that, unlike traditional notions, provides both rigorous yet practical guarantees in the presence of collusion. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our ideas can be applied to practice by designing and implementing Seer, a system that provides a scalable, reliable, and robust method for disseminating content even if participants may fail arbitrarily or deviate selfishly as a coalition. / text

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This thesis considers three restricted universes of partizan combinatorial games and finds new results for misere play using the recently-introduced theory of indistinguishability quotients. The universes are defined by imposing three different conditions on game play: alternating, dicot (all-small), and dead-ending. General results are proved for each main universe, which in turn facilitate detailed analysis of specific subuniverses. In this way, misere monoids are constructed for alternating ends, for pairs of day-2 dicots, and for normal-play numbers, as well as for sets of positions that occur in variations of nim, hackenbush, and kayles, which fall into the alternating, dicot, and dead-ending universes, respectively. Special attention is given to equivalency to zero in misere play. With a new sufficiency condition for the invertibility of games in a restricted universe, the thesis succeeds in demonstrating the invertibility (modulo specific universes) of all alternating ends, all but previous-win alternating non-ends, all but one day-2 dicot, over one thousand day-3 dicots, hackenbush ‘sprigs’, dead ends, normal-play numbers, and partizan kayles positions. Connections are drawn between the three universes, including the recurrence of monoids isomorphic to the group of integers under addition, and the similarities of universe-specific outcome determinants. Among the suggestions for future research is the further investigation of a natural and promising subset of dead-ending games called placement games.

In many (social, economic, and political) strategic situations, conflict and cooperations coexist and group (or coalitional) behavior is as important as individual behavior. This dissertation studies several issues in such situations. / Chapter 1 provides an overview of the theoretical background and motivates the analysis undertaken. / Chapter 2 analyzes strategic situations with diverse coalitional interactions to ascertain the "stable" outcomes that will not be replaced by any rational (hence farsighted) coalition of individuals, and the coalitions that are likely to form. The analysis takes into full account the perfect foresight of rational individuals, which has been overlooked in the literature. / Chapter 3 defines "negotiation-proof Nash equilibrium", a notion that applies to environments where players can negotiate openly and directly prior to the play of a noncooperative game. The merit of the notion of negotiation-proof Nash equilibrium is twofold: (1) It resolves the nestedness and myopia embedded in the notion of coalition-proof Nash equilibrium. (2) The negotiation process, which is formalized by a "graph", serves as a natural alternative to the approach that models pre-play communication by an extensive form game. / Chapter 4 examines the notion of "renegotiation-proofness" in infinitely repeated games. It is shown that imposing renegotiation in all contingencies creates both conceptual and technical difficulties. A notion of self-enforcing agreements is offered: an agreement is self-enforcing if it is immune to any deviation by any coalition which cannot (confidently) count on renegotiation.

Doctor of Philosophy (Economics) / Auctions are an ancient economic institution. Since Vickrey (1961), the development of auction theory has lead to an extremely detailed description of the often desirable characteristics of these simple selling procedures, in the process explaining their enduring popularity. Given the pervasiveness of auctions, the question of how a seller should engineer the rules of these mechanisms to maximize her own profits is a central issue in the organization of markets. The seminal paper of Myerson (1981) shows that when facing buyers with Independent Private Values (IPVs) a standard auction with a specifically selected reserve price (or prices) is optimal, that is, maximizes a seller's expected profits among all conceivable selling mechanisms. In this model, it is assumed that the buyers have perfect information as to the existence of gains from trade. We shall argue that the consequences of this assumption for the design of the optimal auction are not well understood, which motivates our analysis. The three essays of this thesis relax the `known seller valuation' assumption by examining the optimal auction program when the seller (and principal) holds private information representing her reservation value for the good. In the first essay we provide an original technique for comparing ex ante expected profits across mechanisms for a seller facing N>1 potential buyers when all traders hold private information. Our technique addresses mechanisms that cannot be ranked point-by-point through their allocation rules using the Revenue Equivalence Theorem. We find conditions such that the seller's expected profits increase in the slope of each buyer's allocation probability function. This provides new intuition for the fact that a principal does not benefit from holding private information under risk neutrality. Monopoly pricing induces steep probability functions so the seller/principal benefits from announcing a fixed price, and implicitly her private information. An application is presented for the well known k double auction of the bilateral trade literature. In the second and third essays of this thesis, we extend the above framework to allow for informational externalities. Specifically, we allow for the situation in which the seller's private information represents a common value component in buyers' valuations. Thus the seller's private information (say regarding the quality of the good) is of interest to bidders independently of any strategic effects. In recent work Cai, Riley and Ye (2007) have demonstrated that a seller who holds private information about the quality of a good faces an extra consideration in designing an auction; the reserve price signals information to bidders. In a separating equilibrium signalling is costly in the sense that reserves are higher than would be optimal under complete information. We examine the returns to the seller in an English auction from using different types of secret reserve regimes. We find that immediate disclosure of a reserve is preferable to announcement after the auction in the form of a take-it-or-leave-it offer to the winning bidder. Sale occurs less often during the auction for a given reserve price strategy under secret reserve regimes, which increases the incentive for the seller to report more favourable information though the reserve price offer. Separating equilibria involving later announcement therefore generate even lower expected profits to the seller (signalling is more costly) than under immediate disclosure. In the third essay we compare the benchmark signalling equilibrium of immediate disclosure to a screening regime which we call the Right of Refusal. In this extreme form of a secret reserve the seller never announces the reserve price, she simply accepts or rejects the auction price. We find that the Right of Refusal dominates immediate disclosure if the seller's valuation is a sufficient statistic for the private information of interest. Thus a seller with market-relevant private preference information can benefit from not exercising monopoly price setting power. The result also provides conditions under which a competitive screening equilibrium is more efficient than a signalling mechanism. Broadly speaking, screening is better when the common value aspect in the preferences of the informed and uninformed parties are `aligned', and potential gains from trade to the uninformed party are significant. We believe this conclusion to be of particular interest to the design of privatization schemes.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Auburn University, 2007. / Abstract. Includes bibliographic references.

Thesis (B.A. Hons.) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of Psychology, 1970.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of Computing Science, 1974.