Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

This dissertation is an investigation into the determinants of demand for service contracts on new vehicles. In the first chapter, I characterize the consumer decision to buy a service contract with a discrete choice model. Hypotheses and conjectures are tested empirically using survey data from new vehicle buyers. The second chapter consists of the development and testing of an instrument for measuring attitudes toward uncertainty. This tool is useful in gauging aversion toward weak ambiguity. Finally, in the third chapter, I use additional survey and experimental data from new vehicle buyers to further differentiate between the factors that significantly affect the service contract purchase decision. A variety of uncertainty measures and their predictive powers are discussed. I would like to thank the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Network on Preferences and Norms, for their generous financial support, which was indispensable to the completion of this research. / Ph. D.

This study investigated the effectiveness of aversion therapy to help subjects achieve and maintain a weight loss. The aversion therapy made use of an avoidance conditioning procedure. Slides of fattening foods were paired with the possibility of receiving an electric shock in an attempt to induce anxiety. Slides of non-fattening foods were paired with shock avoidance and consequent anxiety relief.

Nowadays BE deals with many other issues besides loss aversion and the preference for fairness mentioned above. There are many works which examine such phenomena like the endowment effect, or the framing effect, the inequality aversion and the judgment choice discrepancy, the money illusion, or the mental accounting. This thesis will examine two of these topics: the discrepancy between choice and judgment and the inequality aversion. It will also try to prove that besides material payoffs there exist nonmaterial payoffs, which influence people's choices through their judgments and can be crucial in some situations, leading sometimes even to reversals in preferences.

根據進化心理學的觀點, 特定情緒具有特定的適應功能, 能夠驅動個體以適應性的行爲反應解決進化環境中反復發生的選擇難題。厭惡情緒與疾病感染關係密切。爲了應對進化環境中反復發生的傳染病威脅, 人們進化出了行爲免疫系統, 以便在病原體進入身體之前, 就以行爲規避的方式遠離病菌。作爲行爲免疫系統的一個環節, 厭惡能夠引發個體的行爲回避傾向, 進而減少個體跟環境中病原體的接觸。跟厭惡不同, 憤怒與社會交往有關。社會交往中冒犯自我利益的做法會引發個體的憤怒, 而憤怒的進化功能在於以威懾和攻擊的方式來減少他人對自我利益的侵害。憤怒促使人們即使花費代價也要對不遵守社會交往規範的肇事者進行懲罰, 有助於個人社會名聲的建立, 既可以威懾其他具有剝削意圖的社會成員, 又能吸引到具有合作意向的社會夥伴。 / 情緒在傳統的道德心理學領域遭受普遍的忽視, 不過已有越來越多理論和實證層面的研究指出情緒在道德判斷的過程中扮演著重要角色。社會直覺主義者模型認爲道德判斷的主導因素是道德直覺, 基於情緒的直覺常常自動快速地做出道德判斷, 而推理和反思則扮演著辯護律師的角色, 主要爲直覺得出的結論尋找支持性的證據。同時, 道德領域被認爲是多元的, 存在跟社會交往、照顧他人、身心純潔、社會等級和內外群體有關的多個領域, 每個領域都有相應的道德直覺。其他研究者也強調情緒跟道德判斷之間存在密切關係。除了理論層面, 實證層面的研究表明道德判斷涉及跟情緒加工有關的諸多腦區, 情緒能夠預測人們的道德判斷, 情緒相關腦區受損者的道德判斷異于常人。不過, 特定情緒影響道德判斷的機制依然有待揭示。 / 進化心理學認爲情緒能夠驅動個體適應性的行爲選擇, 調節個體的諸多生理和心理參數, 以便有效地解決進化環境中發生的適應問題。而道德心理學研究則強調情緒在道德判斷中扮演不可或缺的積極角色。在本研究中我們試圖把兩者結合起來, 認爲特定的情緒具有特定的進化功能, 它們會驅動相關領域中適應性的行爲, 以便解決相關情境中特定的適應問題。有助於問題解決的行爲, 會受到人們的道德認可; 而阻礙問題解決的行爲, 則會受到他們的道德譴責。簡單地說, 特定情緒會影響對該情緒相關領域中的道德判斷, 但不會影響與該情緒無關領域中的道德判斷。厭惡跟病菌威脅有助, 會促使個體做出回避性的防禦行爲, 以便減少疾病感染。在衛生領域, 那些可能傳播疾病的做法會使個體處于健康受威脅的處境中, 因而人們傾向於回避這種行爲以及回避做出這種行爲的肇事者。厭惡情緒驅動的道德譴責有助於他們實現這一目的。 / 雖然有研究者認爲厭惡與衛生無關的道德判斷也有聯繫, 涉及社會交往的冒犯行爲也會引起人們的厭惡, 不過這一觀點存在很大的爭議, 而相關的研究也未能提供足夠的有說服力的證據。而我們認爲跟社會規範有關的情緒更可能是憤怒。憤怒會引發個體做出趨近性的攻擊行爲, 以便威懾他人防止自己受到傷害或不公平待遇。在社會交往領域, 違背社會規範的行爲比如傷害他人或欺騙他人會使人們利益受損, 因而他們傾向於通過攻擊威脅嚇阻這種行爲。憤怒情緒驅動的道德譴責助於實現這一目標。基於這些觀點, 本研究通過多個研究來檢驗厭惡和憤怒對特定道德判斷的不同影響。研究1通過跟中性情緒和焦慮的對比, 預期電影片段引發的厭惡影響跟衛生有關的道德判斷, 但不影響跟公平有關的道德判斷。研究2通過描寫個人經歷引發厭惡和憤怒, 預期厭惡影響跟衛生有關的道德判斷, 而憤怒則影響跟公平有關的道德判斷。研究3通過閱讀道德冒犯的方式啟動厭惡和憤怒情緒, 進一步檢驗厭惡和憤怒是否能夠特定地分別預測衛生領域和公平領域的道德判斷。同時, 研究3也試圖檢驗公平冒犯是否會引起厭惡情緒這一有爭議性的問題。 / 研究結果總體上支持了我們的假設, 即厭惡強化了人們對衛生冒犯的道德譴責, 這一情緒不影響對公平冒犯的道德判斷。同時, 我們發現憤怒跟公平領域的道德判斷同樣存在特定的對應關係, 即憤怒只影響公平領域的道德判斷, 但不影響跟社會交換無關的衛生領域的道德判斷。衛生冒犯和公平冒犯分別引發的最主要情緒是厭惡和憤怒。最後, 我們從特定情緒、情緒的進化功能以及道德判斷的角度對結果進行了討論。 / From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, emotions are adaptations to the recurring specific problems in the ancestral environment. Disgust is pertinent to cues connoting infectious diseases. Being an integral part of the behavioral immune system, the emotion of disgust is elicited by pathogen-connoting cues in the immediate environment. This emotion functions to minimize the contact with pathogens. In contrast, the origin of anger is irrelevant to diseases. The emotion of anger is relevant to deterring harm from others and minimizing exploitation in social exchange. In social interactions, people who are equipped with anger can reduce potential harm and unfairness from others than those who are not. Emotion is neglected in the traditional moral psychology, but more and more theoretical and empirical studies emphasize the important role played by emotion in morality. The social intuitionist model maintains that intuition based on emotion is the primary factor determining moral judgment, whereas reflection and reasoning act as a defending lawyer who only seeks supportive evidence for the conclusion drawn by the intuition. In addition, there are multiple moral domains rather than only one. These extended moral domains include fairness, harm, purity, authority, and loyalty. Empirical studies reveal that moral judgment involves in brain regions relevant to emotions, is predicted by emotions rather than by reasoning, and does not function well in sociopaths whose emotion-related brain regions are impaired. To conclude emotions involve in moral judgment, but the underlying mechanism is not well understood. / Evolutionary psychology proposes that emotions drive adaptive behaviors, and regulate many physiology and psychology parameters so as to resolve specific recurring problems in the ancestral environment. Moral psychology stresses the importance of emotions in moral judgment. In the present research, by combining these two approaches, I propose that specific emotions will drive adaptive behaviors in order to resolve the relevant context-specific problems. In specific moral domains, violations that may increase the risk of being harmed by specific threats, whether disease contagion or social exploitation, would be condemned more when the domain-relevant emotions are made salient. The emotion of disgust is relevant to pathogen threat, and drives withdrawal behavior to minimize contact with disease cues. Moral judgment derived from disgust should be related to hygienic violations that increase the risk of disease infection. In contrast, anger that is relevant to unfair social exchange drives aggression to deter social harm and exploitation by others. Thus, moral judgment derived from anger ould condemn and criticize social violations specifically. / Within this evolutionary framework, I conducted three studies to explore the differential effects of disgust and anger on moral judgment. Specifically, these studies explicitly addressed the hypothesis that disgust would increase moral condemnation of hygiene violations, whereas anger would increase moral criticism of fairness violations. These differential effects were predicted to emerge when violations were related to the self. In Study 1, the two emotions were elicited by watching film clips. In Study 2, they were elicited by writing personal experiences. In Study 3, disgust and anger were elicited and measured by reading relevant behavioral transgressions. Generally, the hypothesis was supported. As predicted, disgust elicited harsher moral judgment toward hygiene violations but not fairness violations. This effect emerged mainly when hygiene violations concerned the self. In contrast, anger predicted moral criticism of fairness violations. These results show that, different from some of the existing literature, disgust specifically influences moral judgment of hygiene violations but not omnibus moral violations. These findings help to clarify the existing literature some of which erroneously equates moral and physical disgust. Consistent with the function of disgust which is to avoid diseases, the emotion is only associated with hygiene-related but not other moral violations. Another important finding about disgust is that it influences hygiene violations only when the violations concern the self. The findings also show that the relationship between anger and fairness moral judgment. This and other implications are discussed in detail. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / 吳宝沛. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 70-94). / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / Wu Baopei. / 緒論 --- p.1 / Chapter 1 --- 情緒的進化心理學視角 --- p.3 / Chapter 1.1 --- 情緒的進化心理學界定 --- p.4 / Chapter 1.2 --- 情緒的進化心理學理論 --- p.5 / Chapter 1.2.1 --- 承諾裝置理論 --- p.7 / Chapter 1.2.2 --- 高位協調理論 --- p.11 / Chapter 1.3 --- 情緒影響道德判斷 --- p.13 / Chapter 2 --- 厭惡、病菌威脅與行爲免疫 --- p.16 / Chapter 2.1 --- 病菌威脅與行爲免疫系統 --- p.16 / Chapter 2.2 --- 作爲行爲免疫系統的社會行爲 --- p.19 / Chapter 2.3 --- 厭惡情緒與道德判斷 --- p.21 / Chapter 2.3.1 --- 厭惡是一種進化而來的抗病情緒 --- p.21 / Chapter 2.3.2 --- 厭惡影響道德判斷 --- p.22 / Chapter 3 --- 憤怒、傷害與社會交換 --- p.25 / Chapter 3.1 --- 憤怒情緒的進化功能 --- p.25 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- 憤怒的再次校正理論 --- p.25 / Chapter 3.1.2 --- 憤怒的承諾裝置理論 --- p.26 / Chapter 3.2 --- 憤怒情緒與道德判斷 --- p.29 / Chapter 4 --- 問題提出 --- p.31 / Chapter 5 --- 研究1 --- p.33 / Chapter 5.1 --- 方法 --- p.33 / Chapter 5.2 --- 結果與討論 --- p.36 / Chapter 5.2.1 --- 初步統計分析 --- p.36 / Chapter 5.2.2 --- 情緒啓動測查 --- p.36 / Chapter 5.2.3 --- 情緒影響道德判斷 --- p.37 / Chapter 5.2.4 --- 討論 --- p.39 / Chapter 6 --- 研究2 --- p.41 / Chapter 6.1 --- 方法 --- p.41 / Chapter 6.2 --- 結果 --- p.42 / Chapter 6.2.1 --- 描述性統計結果 --- p.42 / Chapter 6.2.2 --- 順序效應檢驗 --- p.43 / Chapter 6.2.3 --- 情緒啓動測查 --- p.43 / Chapter 6.2.3 --- 道德判斷的組間差異 --- p.44 / Chapter 6.2.4 --- 討論 --- p.46 / Chapter 7 --- 研究3 --- p.47 / Chapter 7.1 --- 方法 --- p.48 / Chapter 7.2 --- 結果 --- p.49 / Chapter 7.2.1 --- 描述性統計結果 --- p.49 / Chapter 7.2.2 --- 具體情緒體驗的差異 --- p.50 / Chapter 7.2.3 --- 具體情緒對道德冒犯的預測 --- p.51 / Chapter 7.2.4 --- 討論 --- p.52 / Chapter 8 --- 研究討論 --- p.52 / Chapter 8.1 --- 特定情緒和行爲決策 --- p.54 / Chapter 8.2 --- 厭惡與道德判斷之間的關係 --- p.56 / Chapter 8.3 --- 憤怒跟公平冒犯之間的關係 --- p.59 / Chapter 8.4 --- 研究局限與未來的研究展望 --- p.60 / Chapter 9 --- 研究結論 --- p.68 / 參考文獻 --- p.70 / 附錄 --- p.95

This thesis studies loss aversion and reference-dependent preferences. The second chapter and the fourth chapter analyze the price strategy for the monopolist with a loss-averse consumer following the reference-dependent model of Kőszegi and Rabin (2006). The second chapter takes into account the happiness of not paying at the highest price and the disappointment of not paying at the lowest price and finds that this happiness has a positive effect on the monopolist's revenue and this disappointment has a negative effect on the monopolist's revenue. The fourth chapter proposes a two-period pricing model and shows that the monopolist could make use of two-price strategy to earn a revenue that is greater than the product value. The revenue of the two-period model is higher than one-period model when the weight of gain-loss utility is big enough. The third chapter studies the winner's regret with bidders when they have reference-dependent preferences in the sealed-bid first-price auction, second-price auction and all-pay auction and shows that the optimal bid is smaller with regret than without regret for loss-averse bidders, is greater for gain-seeking bidders and is the same for risk-neutral bidders.

No description available.

In standard contract-theoretic models, the underlying assumption is that an agent is purely selfish, and his objective is to maximize his own payoff. A large amount of empirical evidence has pointed out that many individuals are also motivated by other psychological considerations, such as fairness concerns and reciprocity. Theorists have been engaged in finding more realistic assumptions that are consistent with the ways in which economic agents behave in real life. Among the existing theories, the theory of inequity aversion developed by Fehr and Schmidt [35] has attracted enormous attention. It soon became a useful tool in behavioral contract theory, which capitalizes on the power of social preferences theories to enhance understanding of real-world contracting phenomena. The present thesis aims at contributing to the behavioral contract literature by investigating how inequality aversion preferences impact on the optimal contract design in a financial contracting environment and the agent's incentive in a career concerns experiment. Chapter 2 reviews some of the recent theoretical contributions to the development of the theories of reciprocity and fairness. Emphasis is placed on sketching the theories, demonstrating their abilities to explain experimental regularities and pointing out some potential problems that are inherent in the existing theories. In addition, we present a survey of the recent theoretical contributions linking inequality aversion and the theory of incentives, where the traditional selfish agent assumption is replaced by the more realistic assumption that the individual agent is also inequality-averse. Incorporating more realism into economic modelling, such as assuming some individuals are inequality-averse, appears to be a promising avenue for research in the theory of incentives, as it generates more refutable predictions that models based on the selfish agent assumption cannot offer. Chapter 3 analyzes a tractable two-period staged financing model in which a single principal interacts with an agent who is risk-neutral and inequality-averse, offering him an equity contract. We fully characterize the menu of the optimal sharing contracts. Our results show that inequality-aversion changes the structure of the optimal contract. More importantly, we show that it is more likely we will observe an equal sharing contract when the agent is inequality-averse. Our findings for efficiency comparison indicate that inequality-aversion exacerbates the distortions caused by moral hazard, which leads to a further downward distortion in terms of total social welfare in this staged financing context. Incorporating inequality-aversion into a dynamic staged financing game thus allows us to interpret real-world contractual arrangements in the venture capital industry where equal split contracts dominate. In Chapter 4, we revisit the innovative Holmström's-type career concerns experiment by Irlenbusch and Silwka [47]. In particular, we introduce inequality-aversion, a theoretical short cut for reciprocity, into the analysis and investigate if it is the missing link that potentially drives the results in the experiment. Two related but conceptually different models are considered. The complete information model confirms that inequality-aversion induces positive effort in the second period, but does not predict any differences in the effort choices across both periods in the revealed-ability setting. The incomplete information model's predictions conform more closely to the observations in the revealed-ability setting, and its predictions for the hidden-ability setting can partly explain the lower effort choices observed in the hidden-ability setting. Our analysis suggests that inequality-aversion is part of the missing link, but not all. Incorporating fairness intentions into the analysis should open more opportunities for explaining the experimental results in Irlenbusch and Silwka. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1339820 / Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, Business School, 2008

While academics and commentators have devoted considerable energy to analyzing the relationship between United States military casualties and the reaction of American public opinion, few have taken notice of the opinions and perceptions of military officers. U.S. Army officers, comprising the bulk of the American military leadership, sustained a thorough debate concerning casualties and public opinion between 1970 and 1999. That debate is apparent from a study of articles in the military's professional journals, contributions to scholarly journals, memoirs, and monographs emerging from the various service schools. Examining the material generated by officers during these decades reveals that they perceived a trend - as well as disclosing a trend in their own writing and discussions. Shaken by the experience of the Vietnam War, unsettled by the public's rejection of that war, officers struggled to prepare for future wars. In the thirty years under discussion, U.S. Army officers noticed an emphasis on technology intended to be more lethal to the enemy and to provide more protection for the American soldier. Officers observed a doctrinal trend beginning with conserving scarce manpower, escalating to minimizing casualties, and reaching the establishment of force protection as a mission equal to any in a given operation. American officers perceived that their political and military leadership had first grown wary of spending American lives and gradually came to view casualties as synonymous with defeat. Associated with this phenomenon, officers noted that in many cases - increasing as this era advanced - sustaining casualties below a given threshold marked the operation as a victory. In sum, military officers observed a trend in which America's civilian and military leadership strived to avoid sending men into conflict, attempting to mitigate through technology the risk combat posed to soldiers, and reacting to casualties as if they signified military defeat.