Neoclassical economic theorys assumption of a strictly utility of money maximizing economic actor has been unable to explain such economic phenomena as involuntary unemployment and above market clearing wages. Efficiency wage theory, in its various forms, has provided some explanation for these labour market features. Akerlofs (1982) Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis or Partial Gift Exchange model of the labour market explains involuntary unemployment through the productivity enhancing effects of higher wages. In Akerlofs model this is done through a sort of unspoken gift exchange in which higher wages given to the workers are returned to the firm in the form of higher effort or productivity. <p>The Partial Gift Exchange model can also be modeled in a laboratory setting where its various predictions and assumptions can be tested. This has been done by a number of researchers over the last 15 years, who have generally found support for the validity of the theory using a one sided oral auction procedure. This thesis seeks to conduct a similar experiment, but in the form of a survey, the focus of which is the relationship between wages and effort. <p>A number of the results of previous experiments supporting the Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis have also been generated in the survey, for example a positive relationship between wages and effort. New and interesting findings not previously examined in the lab or not present in previous experiment were also present in the survey: the negative effect of wage inequity; a positive coefficient for the gender dummy variable; and the negative effect of unemployment insurance. <p>The survey has produced some new and interesting results, transporting the survey back into the laboratory setting from which it was inspired would provide an interesting comparison.

The aim of this work has been to suggest e-commerce implementations to a partially complete web shop using the script language PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor and the related framework Symfony. The motivation behind the work has been the rapidly changing requirements which web sites have seen during the past few years as a result of the introduction of smart phones and tablets. This in turn led to the company behind the web shop Persiennbutiken needing a new web site.   In addition to taking the latest web design trends into consideration, the work is also studying behavioural economics in order to provide a solution which not only work, but also helps increasing profit with the help of clever technology. The importance of relevant statistics when developing new features is also highlighted and how to gather that statistics in a non-intrusive way.   Each suggested implementation is measured against quite a few performance measures emphasising functionality, performance and security. All very important aspects when building a web shop as is seen in this report.   The results indicate that the suggested implementations are able to fulfil the set requirements to a varying degree with different estimated development time. This leads to a recommended final solution which tries to balance development time versus features, relying on existing libraries where possible.   Finally, the report also suggests a new way of dealing with database cache invalidation when using Symfony in conjunction with the object-relational mapping tool Doctrine.

This thesis uses laboratory and field experiments to examine the underlying motivations that drive biased and discriminatory behaviour. Its focus is on the differential treatment of others that stems from individuals’ preferences for particular social and ethnic groups. The unifying theme of this thesis is the exploration of how such discriminatory tastes can manifest themselves within individuals’ social and other–regarding preferences, determining the extent to which they care about the welfare of others. The prevalence and implications of these types of preferences are considered in both market and non–market settings.

This study investigates the effect of offering Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) against HIV, as a public policy, on the spread of syphilis through behavioral changes on the willingness to engage on riskier sex behavior (i.e. condomless sex). To explore such phenomena, a Difference in Differences method is applied to groups of municipalities in the southeastern region of Brazil. No significant effect was found after restricting the sample to approximate the underlying characteristics of the groups. The results do not support the findings of the previous studies, performed on smaller target groups, nor contradict them. The inconclusiveness of the results is likely due to, amongst other factors, the small number of individuals both taking PrEP or diagnosed with syphilis, compared to the general population of the municipalities.

Rationale: Individuals with addictive disorders commonly exhibit a shortened temporal window, which interferes with treatment focusing on long-term sobriety. Episodic Future Thinking (EFT) involves generating personalized cues related to anticipated, positive events at various future time points. EFT has been shown to reduce the reinforcing value of addictive substances; however, this has only been shown in non-treatment samples. Purpose: To examine the feasibility, cumulative, and sustained effects of implementing EFT in a treatment seeking addiction sample over a 1-week protocol on decision-making and alcohol motivation. Methods: Twenty-eight treatment seeking individuals were randomly assigned to either undergo an EFT intervention or a control Episodic Recent Thinking (ERT) protocol. Assessments were completed at baseline, end of week 1, and a 1-week follow-up. Measures included a delay discounting task, hypothetical alcohol purchase task, clinical outcome measures, and cognitive mechanism measures. Results: There were significant reductions in alcohol demand indices, delay discounting rates, and an increase in mindful attention awareness after both acute and extended exposure to EFT. Furthermore, the EFT group showed greater reductions compared to the ERT group after extended exposure to their cues. Conclusion: The results suggest that early implementation of EFT in a treatment seeking addiction sample is beneficial to counteract motivating factors for relapse. This study lays the foundation for future clinical trials for EFT as a supplemental therapy for addictions treatment. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / People with substance use disorders have a significantly shortened time perspective compared to healthy controls. This means that these individuals struggle with thinking about future events beyond several days to a week. Shortened time perspective can be a significant barrier to addiction treatments that typically focus on long-term positive benefits of sobriety or low-risk use. This study examined whether mindful thinking about future events impacted decision-making and motivation for alcohol and drugs. The study used an experimental protocol known as Episodic Future Thinking (EFT) that involves participants interacting with personalized cues related to positive future events. Prior research using EFT in addiction samples has found that interacting with future cues significantly increases delay of gratification, reduces cigarette use, and decreases reinforcing value of alcohol. In this study, we recruited 28 participants with an alcohol use disorder (AUD). Participants practiced EFT training over a two-week protocol. We tested decision making, alcohol craving, and other variables following a single EFT protocol, and changes in these measures over repeated practice. We found significant changes in alcohol craving, decision making, and mindfulness awareness. The study provides proof-of-concept for using EFT in an AUD treatment population and lays the foundation for future clinical trials of EFT as a complement to existing addiction treatments.

How should the experimental use mechanism be designed in order to maintain the proper balance between the rights of patent holders and the rights retained by the public? The work explores various approaches towards the experimental use exemption in influential regions, such as US UK Germany Japan as well as in international treaties. In each of these systems some degree of vulnerability is found. Either exemption is too narrow or too broad and lacking a dynamic dimension. Therefore, the work sets out to design a dynamic and multi-step experimental use mechanism. The work proposes to view the experimental use mechanism as a right provided to the public and in turn as a duty imposed on the patent holder to suggest path/s of exploration with regard to the patented invention. This approach significantly strengthens the experimental use mechanism as it becomes part of the bundle of requirements that an inventor needs to comply with in order to obtain a patent grant. The scope of the experimental use mechanism will be determined by a three step process. In the first stage the positions and interests of the inventor, invention and researcher will be taken into account in order to determine the incentives needed to cause inventors to stay within the patent system and at the same time prevent researches from migrating to other regions. In the second stage the scope of the experimental use mechanism will be impacted by the determination whether either party adopted anticompetitive behavior. The final step will inquire whether the invention or the research is geared at improving public health. In these instances there will be a tendency to increase the scope of the experimental use mechanism due to the internationally recognized right to health and its global importance. The work incorporates concepts from different legal fields such as competition law and health policy as well as from other disciplines including economics and psychology The three step process has the potential of designing a dynamic and robust experimental use mechanism which may prove to be useful in other patent settings such as the holdup problem or blocking patents. Incorporating a flexible experimental use mechanism may diminish the attempts of patent holders to act opportunistically and curtail the rights of the public. Thus, the work contributes to the current state of the experimental use debate and towards achieving the proper balance between the rights of the patent holder and the rights of the public.

Rural inhabitants of developing countries face extraordinarily risky environments, and decision-making under risk has crucial implications for the welfare of the rural poor. Therefore, obtaining a better understanding of the behaviour under risk of low-income populations is a vital step in the comprehension of human behaviour, and is important for effective policy design and evaluation, as well as for shedding light on production, investment and technology adoption decisions. In Chapter One, I analyze data collected from a laboratory experiment involving poor subjects in rural Ethiopia, in order to determine which decision models (and corresponding risk preferences) best describe the decision-making under risk of inhabitants. I find that expected utility theory (EUT) does not provide a good overall description of the decisions made by participants in the experiment; instead, there is evidence of probability weighting and loss aversion, implying that rank-dependent and reference-dependent choice models are more likely to represent the true latent decision-making process of subjects. In Chapter Two, I analyze combined experimental and survey data from rural Ethiopia in order to evaluate the determinants of risk preferences as well as assess the degree of asset integration in experimental decisions. Analyzing both EUT and non-EUT decision models and using an instrumental variable strategy, I find that household wealth negatively affects both risk aversion and loss aversion, but independent background risk has no effect on risk preferences. Further, I find evidence of narrow framing, as opposed to asset integration, suggesting that participants make decisions in the experiment in isolation from outside wealth. In Chapter Three, I analyze experimental data from Brazil to evaluate whether subjects understand decision problems that use the complex Multiple Price List (MPL) elicitation procedure, and to determine which decision models best describe observed choices. I find that the MPL decision problems of the experiment enable a finer characterization of risk preferences as compared to Ordered Lottery Selection problems (used in the Ethiopian experiment). However, I find that a significant fraction of choice patterns in the MPL problems are intransitive, and the evidence indicates that subjects did not properly understand the decision problems and thus observed choices do not reveal true risk preferences. Therefore, the relatively complex MPL procedure may not be suitable for experiments conducted with poorly-educated subjects in developing country settings. Chapter Four presents a theory outlining the relationship between rational demand for index insurance – for which the net transfer between insurer and policyholders depends only on a publicly verifiable index – and wealth. Further, the validity of this theory is tested using the experimental data from Ethiopia. In line with the theoretical model presented, due to basis risk and actuarially unfair premiums, demand for index insurance is hump-shaped – first increasing then decreasing – in wealth. The results indicate that the low take-up of this product observed among the poorest (and most risk averse) individuals in recent field studies may result from rational choice rather than credit constraints or poor decision-making.

These experiments used 15 domestic hens to investigate the inferior-good effect, a decrease in consumption of a commodity as income increases. Experiment 1 investigated plain and salted wheat to serve as superior goods (opposite to inferior goods) and inferior goods. Hens consumed mostly plain wheat when given ad-libitum access so it was the intended superior good and salted wheat was the intended inferior good. In the next experiments, 3 s of plain wheat and 10 s of salted wheat were available for single responses on 2 keys during discrete trials. Income changed by changing the inter-trial interval (ITI) of fixed-length sessions or the total number of trials. Experiment 2 partially replicated the Silberberg et al. (1987) procedure, using the ITI income analogue for 6 hens. When income increased, 4 hens sometimes responded less on the salted-wheat key (demonstrating the inferior-good effect), 2 of these hens and a 5th hen sometimes responded more on both keys but proportionally more on the plain-wheat key (termed here as a relative inferior-good effect). Experiment 3a partially replicated the Hastjarjo et al. (1990a) procedure using the total-trials analogue for 7 other hens. The inferior-good effect occurred across some conditions for 2 hens while other hens tended to respond on the plain-wheat key, suggesting lack of contingency contact. When a 60-s ITI was added in Experiment 3b, variability increased for most hens, but only 1 hen showed the effect, 1 of the hens that did so in Experiment 3b. These 6 hens' (1 died) 80% bodyweights were re-assessed in Experiment 4 and hens were below 80% during Experiments 3a and 3b, suggesting that the lack of the inferior-good effect was not due to some hens being at high weights. The ITI analogue was used for these 6 hens in Experiment 5 and the effect occurred for 2 hens. Experiment 6 added forced-choice trials to the total-trials analogue (with 60-s ITI) to guarantee contingency contact. The inferior- and/or relative-inferior-good effect occurred for 3 hens. Across Experiments 2 through 6, body weights were usually heavier in high-income conditions and a within-session pattern of early-salted-late-plain responding occasionally occurred. Crop capacities of 5 Experiment-2 hens and a new hen (1 died) were assessed in Experiment 7 and there was no relation between this measure and inferior-or relative-inferior-good effects. Experiments 8 and 9 examined effects of pre- and post-feed in low-income conditions using the ITI analogue. When hens were pre-fed, responding for 5 of 7 hens resembled responding in high-income conditions of Experiment 2 with more plain-wheat responding and similar or less salted-wheat responding in some conditions (behaviour similar to the inferior- and relative-inferior-good effects, but without the income change). A similar pattern was found for 4 of 5 hens when hens were post-fed in Experiment 9, suggesting that food in the digestive tract may have played a role, and perhaps not the income manipulations themselves, where it (or other component of body weight) may have abolished quantity (i.e., the intended-inferior-good) as a reinforcer. Although these experiments occasionally demonstrated inferior- and relative-inferior-good effects, but less convincingly than published studies, the effects of income may have been non-specific. The usefulness of the inferior-good concept and other income-related economic concepts are thus challenged.

Bakgrund: För att ge vägledning till hur samhället skall värdera nutida effekter gentemotframtida, exempelvis att rädda liv eller fördela samhälleliga investeringar, har ekonomergenomfört stated preference-studier med syfte att undersöka individers samhälleligatidspreferenser. Studiernas resultat har producerat en stor variation kring hur individervärderar framtida utfall jämfört med nutida. Resultaten har dock tolkats som att individer,även om tidspreferenserna varierar i storlek, värderar framtida utfall lägre än nutida. ShaneFrederick genomförde 1999 en studie, som Frederick benämnde som ett ”robusthetstest” avden dittills använda metodiken, där han i motsats till tidigare studier inte bara erbjödrespondenterna ett nutida utfall jämfört med ett framtida, utan även erbjöd respondenternaolika sekventiella fördelningar över tid. Resultaten kontrasterade tydligt tidigare studiersresultat, respondenterna föredrog exempelvis att rädda liv fördelat på tre generationer iställetför endast i deras egen – vilket indikerade att respondenterna hade negativa tidspreferenser!Inga uppföljningsstudier har därefter genomförts.Syfte: Att undersöka individers samhälleliga tidspreferenser när de erbjuds sekventiellafördelningar över tid.Metod: Två enkätundersökningar genomfördes vid Linköpings universitet. Respondenternaställdes inför olika sekventiella fördelningar för räddandet av liv och samhälleligaupprustningar, såväl i ett intra- som ett intergenerationsperspektiv.Slutsats: Vi finner ej stöd för att en majoritet av individerna värderar framtida samhälleligaupprustningar eller att rädda framtida liv, lägre än nutida. Vi finner heller ej stöd för attindividers tidspreferenser endast innefattar en preferens för den tidshorisontella absolutafördelningen (nutid gentemot framtid). I både ett intra- och ett intergenerationsperspektivföredrog den största andelen av respondenterna en jämn fördelning över tid. I ettintragenerationsperspektiv, där vi erbjöd individerna olika sekventiella fördelningar över tid,påverkades respondenternas val av den relativa fördelningen över tid. Alla resultatuppvisades för både räddandet av liv och samhälleliga upprustningar. / Background: To give guidance for societal policy decisions on how to value future effectscompared to present, economists have used stated preference methodology to measureindividuals’ societal time preferences. The results have produced a great variety in the size ofindividuals’ time preferences, but have in general at least concluded that individuals valuefuture effects less then present. Shane Frederick performed in 1999 what he called a “test ofrobustness” of the methodology used in previous studies. Instead of just offering individualsto choose from an outcome today towards an outcome x years from now, he also offeredrespondents outcomes sequentially spread out across time. The results contradicted those ofprevious studies. For example 80% of the respondents preferred to save 300 lives across 3generations instead of 300 in their own – which implied negative time preferences! Nofurther follow up studies have been performed.Objective: Investigate individuals’ societal time preferences, when they are offeredsequential outcomes over time.Methodology: Two questionnaires where handed out at Linköpings university. Therespondents where offered different sequential outcomes over time for saving lives and whenpublic investments should occur, in as well an intra- as an intergenerational perspective.Conclusion: Our findings do not indicate that a majority of the individuals value savingfuture lives less then present lives, or that they value future public investments less thenfuture investments. Neither do they indicate that individuals’ societal time preferences onlyincorporate the absolute time horizontal aspect. In both an intra- and an intergenerationalperspective the largest fraction of the individuals preferred an equal distribution over time. Inan intragenerational perspective, where we offered individuals different sequentialdistributions, the individuals choice where affected by the relative distribution over time. Allfindings where present both for saving lives and public investments.

Cox, Friedman, and Sadiraj (2008) develop a model of reciprocity, „Revealed Altruism‟, which posits that a „more generous than‟ (MGT) offer elicits a „more altruistic than‟ (MAT) response. A MGT ordering is defined by two conditions. Condition a) states that MGT is ordered by the maximum potential increase in income of the recipient, or that the more you stand to receive from an offer, the more generous it is to you. Condition b) states that the increase in maximum potential income of the recipient cannot be less than the maximum potential increase in income of the proposers. In other words, Condition b) states that an offer cannot be self-serving, but it is not specified in Cox, Friedman, and Sadiraj (2008) precisely how b) affects the MGT ordering. I propose that a violation of b) is considered self-serving and is less MGT than when b) is not violated. I then experimentally study the empirical relevance of b) using two designs that hold a) constant, comparing MGT differences implied by responses. The first design is a variant of the Lost Wallet Game (Dufwenberg & Gneezy, 2000) with a negative outside option, and the second design is a modified Investment Game (Berg, Dickhaut, & McCabe, 1995) with elements of the Dictator Game implemented by Andreoni and Miller (2002). I find no empirical support that b) affects the MGT ordering.