Careless Society: Drivers of (Un)Secure Passwords Thesis abstract Vojtěch Nedvěd May 2, 2021 Vulnerabilities related to poor cybersecurity are a dangerous global economic issue. This thesis aims to explain two examples of poor password management. First, why users use similar password and username and second, why they reuse their passwords, as the main drivers of this behaviour are unknown. We examined the effects of selected macroeconomic variables, gender, password length and password complexity. Additionally, this thesis suggest how to estimate sentiment in passwords using models build on Twitter posts. The results are verified on large password data, including password leaks from recent years. There are four main findings. First, a higher cybersecurity index and diversity of a password seem to be related to the lower similarity between a username and a password. Second, it seems that there are structural differences between countries and languages. Third, the sentiment seems to be a significant determinant too. Fourth, password reuse seems to be positively affected by the cybersecurity level. The thesis contributes to the study of password management. It proposes how to model the relationship, derive the data, split the passwords into words, model the sentiment of passwords, what variables might be...

Indoor tanning remains a popular activity in Western cultures despite a growing body of literature suggesting its link to skin cancer and melanoma. Advances in indoor tanning research have illuminated problematic patterns of its use. With problems such as difficulty quitting, devoting resources toward its use at the expense of healthy activities, and excessive motivation and urges to tan, symptoms of excessive indoor tanning appear consistent with behavioral addiction. The present study bridges the gap between clinical approaches to understanding indoor tanning problems and behavioral economic considerations of unhealthy habits and addiction. Eighty undergraduate females completed both the Behavioral Addiction Indoor Tanning Screener and the Tanning Purchase Task. Results suggest that behavioral economic demand for tanning significantly differs between risk classification groups, providing divergent validity to the Behavioral Addiction Indoor Tanning Screener and offering additional evidence of the sensitivity of the Tanning Purchase Task to differentiating groups according to tanning profiles.

Thesis advisor: Uzi Segal / This collection of papers examines applications of microeconomic theory to practical problems. More specifically, I identify frictions between theoretical results and agent behavior. I seek to resolve these tensions by either proposing mechanisms to more closely capture the theoretical environment of interest or extending the model to more closely approximate the world as individuals perceive it. In the first chapter, "Compensation without Distortion,'' I propose a new mechanism for compensating subjects in preference elicitation experiments. The motivation for this tool is the theoretical problem of incentive compatibility in decision experiments. A hallmark of experimental economics is the connection between a subject's payment with their actions or decisions, however previous literature has highlighted shortcomings in this link between compensation and methods currently used to elicit beliefs. Specifically, compensating individuals based on choices they make increases reliability, however these payments can themselves distort subjects' preferences, limiting the resulting data's usefulness. I reexamine the source of the underlying theoretical tension, and propose using a stochastic termination mechanism called the "random stopping procedure'' (RSP). I show that the RSP is theoretically able to structurally avoid preference distortions induced by the current state of the art protocols. Changing the underlying context subjects answer questions—by resolving payoff uncertainty immediately after every decision is made—the assumed impossibility of asking multiple questions without creating preference distortions is theoretically resolved. To test this prediction, I conduct an experiment explicitly designed to test the accuracy of data gathered by the RSP against the current best practice for measuring subject preferences. Results show that RSP-elicited preferences more closely match a control group's responses than the alternative. In the second chapter, "School Choice and Class Size Externalities,'' I revisit the many-to-one matching problem of school choice. I focus on the importance of problem definition, and argue that the "standard'' school choice model is insufficiently sensitive to relevant characteristics of student preferences. Motivated by the observation that students care about both the school they attend, and how over- or under-crowded the school is, I extend the problem definition to allow students to report preferences over both schools and cohort sizes. (Cohort size is intended as a generalization of school crowding, relative resources, or other similar school characteristics.) I show that, if students do have preferences over schools and cohort sizes, current mechanisms lose many of their advantageous properties, and are no longer stable, fair, nor non-wasteful. Moreover, I show that current mechanisms no longer necessarily incentivize students to truthfully report their preferences over school orderings. Motivated by the observation that students care about both the school they attend, and how over- or under-crowded the school is, in "School Choice and Class Size Externalities'' I extend the standard school choice problem to incorporate both of these elements. I show that, if students do have preferences over schools and cohort sizes, current mechanisms are no longer stable, fair, nor non-wasteful. In response, I construct an alternative matching mechanism, called the deferred acceptance with voluntary withdrawals (DAwVW) mechanism, which improves on the underlying (unobserved) manipulability of "standard" mechanisms. The DAwVW mechanism is deterministic and terminates, more closely satisfies core desirable matching properties, and can yield substantial efficiency gains compared to mechanisms that do not consider class size. In the third chapter, I provide an overview of the history of decision experiments in economics, describe several of the underlying tensions that motivate my other projects, and identify alternative potential solutions that have been proposed by others to these problems. In this project, I add context to the larger field of experimental economics in which my research is situated. In addition to the mechanisms discussed by prior literature reviews, I incorporate and discuss recently developed payment and elicitation methods, and identify these new approaches' advantages and drawbacks. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

The median wealth of Blacks is lower than that of Whites by 90 percent. The corresponding median income for Blacks is 40 percent below Whites. Additional research has revealed that Blacks tend to invest in low-yielding assets and borrow at high interest rates. The alarming problem is that financial outcomes and behaviors can be associated with race. In this cross-sectional quantitative study, the Rosenberg Self-Esteem and the Money Attitude Scale, both are Likert-type scales, served as survey instruments to collect data from Blacks and Whites about their individual financial behaviors. The purpose of this survey was to explore the relationship between self-esteem and monetary power among Blacks and Whites in the Unites States. The Behavioral life-cycle hypothesis served as the theoretical framework for the study. The research question for this study was as follows: There is a relationship between self-esteem and monetary power among Blacks and Whites in the United States. Using the IBM SPSS analytics software, the findings of the linear multiple regression analyses indicated that there was a significant predictive relationship between self-esteem and retention time, self-esteem and distrust, and self-esteem and anxiety. There were no correlation findings related to race, there were however, correlations related to gender. Regional investigative studies to gather data about behavioral factors that drive decision making are still necessary. The social change implication as it relates to asset accumulation is that financial services professionals will begin to shift attention away from financial accounting outcome matters toward behavioral lifestyle outcome matters

Economists are still searching for methods to reduce/eliminate Hypothetical Bias (HB). Different methods have been previously applied some with success and others without. In this study, we aimed to further test the cognitive dissonance approach (CD) through a learning design method to estimate the WTP for five beef attributes: Non-quality, Kentucky Proud, Appalachian, Grass Fed and a mix of 25% Non-quality and 75% Kentucky Proud, using a one and one half bounded model. To test the CD, 881 participants from the University of Kentucky, were randomly assigned to a real/hypothetical market for a battery recycling project at first and afterwards to a hypothetical market for beef. For the battery recycling, participants were asked to donate $1, $2 or $3. For the beef market, participants were randomly assigned to a $4 or $6 for the non-quality attribute patty. Participants assigned to a $4 were afterwards randomly assigned to a $4.5, $5, $5.5 or $6 and the ones assigned to a $6 were afterwards assigned to a $6.5, $7, $7.5 and $8 for the other attribute patties. From this study, we found that the learning design was effective in reducing the cognitive dissonance or conflicts between what consumers say and their actions.

The Federal Reserve has proposed a change in its method of administering the discount window. This paper looks at the effects of this proposal on monetary control and on the money markets, assuming that banks base their behavior on profit maximization over the long run. First, the reserve supply process is postulated. The conditions under which borrowing from the Federal Reserve will improve or reduce monetary control are stated. Second, the primary reserve adjustment process is formulated to show how primary reserve adjustment can affect rates in the money market. Finally arguments are set forth to show how borrowed reserves would behave if commercial banks are attempting to maximize long run profits and under the discount window administration proposed by the Federal Reserve Committee. The conclusion is that borrowed reserves will behave to reduce money market instability but at the same time they will behave to reduce the Federal Reserve control over the stock of Reserves available to the banking system. Borrowing from the Federal Reserve Bank can be expected to behave in a way of offset Federal Reserve open market operations.

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It is sometimes said that money speaks louder than words, and in a world where financial decisions are a major driving force, it is interesting to explore how monetary incentives influence our decision making. Some argue that intrinsic motivation is sufficient to be able to measure prosocial decision-making, but what happens when we add monetary incentives to experiments that might otherwise be conducted with hypothetical scenarios? In this study, we conduct an online experiment with 1002 participants to explore if decision making changes when monetary incentives are introduced. The experiment includes five different social dilemmas involving distributions of money between participants. There are two conditions where one group makes hypothetical decisions and the other group receives money based on their decisions (i.e., is incentivized). Furthermore, we investigate if income, age and gender affect prosocial behavior. Our results suggest that both conditions show similar effects on prosocial behavior which implies that usage of either one of the two conditions will generate an equivalent outcome. The effects from household income, age and gender were significant in some social dilemmas, but the effect was not practically relevant for this study. We believe our results may be useful to include in the discussion of whether or not monetary incentives and hypothetical decisions generate similar results when studying prosocial behavior in decision making in experiments.

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