The word reciprocity describes the multi dimensional relationship between architecture and its site. The definition of reciprocity is commonly understood as mutual exchange and dependence. As "site" provides a place for architecture, architecture bears the social responsibility to provide comfort, protection, function and connectivity to the site and its environment. Harmony in architecture is a result of reciprocity; it is the result of the reciprocity between the nature and artifice. When architectural form adopts and supports each element on the site, the site will be enhanced from the establishment of architecture. In a macro sense, architectural forms become icons, landmarks, or spiritual backgrounds for culture and events. These activities of exchange and dependency assist in holding culture values and integrating society. It is the architect's social responsibility to cultivate this experience and to disseminate this idea. Fundamentally, architects must consider the user needs and establish proper connections between the architecture and its site. Reciprocity confirms the existence of architecture. / Master of Architecture

This dissertation consists of three chapters that focus on topics in fields of experimental economics and health economics. The first chapter, “Do I Care if You Know I Betrayed You?” , examines how concern for others’ disutility from betrayal can affect the decision to repay trust in the trust game. We use a laboratory experiment to compare trustees’ behavior when betrayal is obfuscated to an identical monetary payoffs situation where betrayal is revealed. We find that more trustees choose to defect in our experiment when betrayal is obfuscated than when it is revealed. Our result suggests that concern for betrayal costs influences not only the decision to trust but also the decision to repay trust. The second chapter, “Increasing Organ Donation via Changes in the Default Choice or Allocation Rule”, utilizes a laboratory experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of alternative public policies targeted at increasing the rate of deceased donor organ donation. The experiment includes treatments across different default choices and organ allocation rules inspired by the donor registration systems applied in different countries. Our results indicate that the opt-out with priority rule system generates the largest increase in organ donation relative to an opt-in only program. However, sizeable gains are achievable using either a priority rule or opt-out program separately, with the opt-out rule generating approximately 80% of the benefits achieved under a priority rule program. The third chapter, “Improving the Approach to Organ Donor Registration”, proposes to improve organ donor registry by providing a persuasive message with the registration request. I designed a laboratory experiment to examine the impact of the persuasive message on donation decisions. The results indicate that the persuasive message has a positive impact on donation decisions in the early rounds of the experiment. Subjects were about 21 percent more likely to register as a donor in round 1 of the experiment when they were provided with a persuasive message. This behavioral difference across treatment decreased as subjects played more rounds, since subjects in the control treatment learned the information in the persuasive message through playing the game. We further find this treatment effect is mainly from subjects who are not organ donors in real life, while the treatment effect is very small for those who are self-reported organ donors.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Clinical Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-94). Also available in electronic version.

Thesis (M.S. in Defense Analysis)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2007. / Thesis Advisor(s): Nancy Roberts. "June 2007." Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-64). Also available in print.

Chapter 1 of the thesis examines a question of how a voting process can be designed to induce rational individuals to display reciprocal and pro-social behaviors. A political procedure, namely, the reciprocity mechanism, is proposed to address this issue. The analysis displays that this new mechanism is a modification of the legislative process encountered in democratic countries. The results indicate that, under natural assumptions on voters' preferences, a stable policy always exists, and it may be unique if preferences are single-peaked. Moreover, any stable policy is Pareto-efficient. It has been argued that the size of the supermajority needed to enact a policy in a decision-making body should depend on the importance of this policy. However, a formal analysis of the relationship between policy importance and the voting rule is still lacking in the literature. Chapter 2 addresses this gap from the perspective of a preference-blind political designer. Given the level of importance of a policy, the goal is to choose the supermajority rule that guarantees the existence of a stable policy regardless of the extent to which individual political opinions are antagonistic, ensures that all stable policies are efficient, and minimizes status quo bias. Chapter 2 solves this problem. A closed-form relationship between supermajority rule and policy importance is derived. The analysis has practical implications for the optimal design and functioning of political institutions. The majority rule is widely used to select policies in political institutions. Chapter 3 proves that this rule is not optimal for sufficiently complex policies. To address this issue, natural preference domains are identified for which the majority rule is optimal under a simple sequential procedure. Under this procedure, the majority rule guarantees the existence of a stable policy, ensures that all stable policies are efficient, and minimizes the status quo bias, no matter the complexity of the policy space. The results imply that this voting rule is not appropriate for certain types of societies, including sufficiently fractionalized societies.

No description available.

This thesis analyzes early Anglo-American commercial relations and reforms, post-war American maritime policy and its effect on Europe, including Britain, British domestic forces which promoted reform, the specific measures passed by Congress and Parliament, and finally, the Anglo-American colonial trade struggle, with emphasis upon the United States long quest to gain admission to the British West Indies.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1937. / Published also without thesis note. Bibliography: p. 337-366.

Thesis--Columbia university. / Typescript. Bibliography: l. 403-432.