xiii, 230 p. : ill. (some col.) / I develop a model in which a representative consumer selects an affordable consumption bundle, not as a single choice, but as the end result of a series of smaller, incremental purchase decisions. If the array of such incremental choices facing the consumer is sufficiently complex relative to the consumer's computational abilities, then the consumer may choose to employ a simplifying heuristic or rule-of-thumb to guide her behavior. I demonstrate the existence of a simple and well-defined example of such a strategy, based upon a satisficing decision rule. I further show that in the strategic setting defined by the interaction between consumers and firms that compete in prices, this satisficing strategy can form part of a Nash equilibrium, despite being ex ante only boundedly rational. The use of this satisficing demand strategy fundamentally alters the nature of price competition between firms (relative to the standard Bertrand model), changing the shape of the firm best response functions. The use of a satisficing strategy alters the incentives of firms, and these altered firm incentives lead to pricing behavior which has the effect of rationalizing the satisficing consumption strategy, so that a truly novel class of Nash equilibria in price-competing markets can be shown to exist under certain conditions. We explore the nature of this new class of equilibria, and find that equilibrium prices may be higher than those which would be obtained in the standard Bertrand case. In general, demand curves for each distinct good will have a kinked shape, similar to those found in 1939 papers by both Sweezy and Hall & Hitch. The Nash equilibrium profile will involve the kink in each demand curve coinciding with the equilibrium price for the corresponding good. The equilibrium price vector will therefore be robust to "small" fluctuations in cost (since marginal revenue is discontinuous at the equilibrium price), and under certain conditions, we find that prices may be upwardly flexible but downwardly rigid. We make an argument that the main results of the paper generalize from a representative agent setting to one with a population of heterogeneous consumers. / Committee in charge: Dr. Van Kolpin， Chairperson； Dr. Christopher J. Ellis， Member； Dr. Jeremy Piger， Member； Dr. Renee Irvin， Outside Member

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.

<p>This study examines several emerging topics in strategic communication and information design. The first chapter studies the role of verification in persuasion and its interaction with commitment in a Bayesian persuasion framework in which the sender is not fully bound by the committed plan. Both theoretically and experimentally, we demonstrate that making verification easier can significantly improve information transmission when commitment is low, but its effect is limited when commitment is high. However, empirically receivers do not respond as strongly as predicted by theory, which is consistent with base-rate neglect and conservatism. On the other hand, senders generally anticipate receivers' actions and best respond to the empirical behavior of receivers. We provide empirical implications for cases where verification is instrumental in improving information transmission and where it is not. </p> <p><br></p> <p>The second and third chapters are based on joint work with Dr. Collin Raymond. In the second chapter, we investigate how increasing the complexity of the message space in the presence of limited memory can reduce misrepresentation in strategic communication. We enrich a standard cheap talk game so that senders must communicate not just a payoff-relevant state, but also payoff-irrelevant attributes correlated with the state.  We show that increasing the set of attributes that may need to be reported (i.e., the complexity of the game) improves the amount of information transmitted in equilibrium. Our findings demonstrate that the reporting of redundant information may induce equilibria that feature improved outcomes compared to simpler, more direct reporting systems, and point out the importance of complexity when trying to induce truthful information revelation.</p> <p><br></p> <p>In the third chapter, we analyze some extensions on the effect of complexity. We present experimental evidence which shows that  too much of an increase in complexity leads to a reversal of those gains. Limited memory on the part of players, as well as the relative complexity faced by senders and receivers, drives these changes, and individuals experience cognitive costs when dealing with complex environments that they are willing to pay to avoid. </p> <p><br></p>

Heterogeneous consumers make the decision to buy a durable good or to download a replica, and a monopolist chooses to price and protect their intellectual property in the form of an authentication cost. An optimal price and authentication cost is derived, and shown to be higher than the efficient outcome for a uniform distribution of consumers. The optimal selection of price and protection are shown to be commensurate with his authenticating technology, and the searching ability of consumers. As an extension, a layout for a monopolist problem where consumers have different searching abilities is shown to be indistinct from a homogeneous case when consumers are uniformly distributed.

This dissertation presents an extension of the warlord competition models found in Skaperdas (2002) and Konrad and Skaperdas (2012). I consider two non-parasitic warlords located on a line. Each warlord allocates resources for the extraction of natural resources, the production of goods and services, and conflict with the opposing warlord. Within the symmetric rates of seizure model, I use three different forms of the contest success function, a primary tool in the conflict theory literature, in my analysis. I show that the warlord closer to the point of conflict will invest less into the hiring of warriors and more into the production of goods and services, yet wins a larger proportion of total goods and services produced within the economy. Under certain conditions, the placement of the point of conflict at the midpoint between the two warlords maximizes the total resources toward war and minimizes total production. Under the asymmetric rates of seizure model, I find that the warlord closer to the point of conflict invests more in warfare and less in production; that is, results that counter what is found in the symmetric model. / Economics

<p>Contest outcomes often involve some mix of skill and chance.  In three essays, I vary the sources of noise and show how player actions either influence, or are influenced by, noise.  I begin with a classic multi-battle contest, the Colonel Blotto game.  Due to his disadvantage in resources, the weak player in this contest stochastically distributes resources to a subset of battlefields while neglecting all others in an attempt to achieve a positive payoff.  In contrast, the strong player evenly distributes his resources in order to defend all battlefields, while randomly assigning extra resources to some.  Because the weak player benefits from randomizing over larger numbers of battlefields, a strong player has incentive to decrease the range over which the weak player can randomize.  When battlefields are exogenously partitioned into subsets, or \textit{fronts}, he is able to do this by decentralizing his forces to each front in a stage prior to the distribution of forces to battlefields and actual conflict.  These allocations are permanent, and each subset of battlefields effectively becomes its own, independent Blotto subgame.  I show that there exist parameter regions in which the strong player's unique equilibrium payoffs with decentralization are strictly higher than the unique equilibrium payoffs without decentralization.</p> <p><br></p> <p>In my second paper, I show how sources of exogenous noise, what Clausewitz referred to as the ``fog of war," obscure developments on the battlefield from the view of a military leader, while individual inexperience and lack of expertise in a particular situation influence his decisionmaking.  I model both forms of uncertainty using the decentralized Colonel Blotto game from the first chapter.  To do so, I first test the robustness of allocation-stage subgame perfect equilibria by changing the contest success function to a lottery, then I find the players' quantal response equilibria (QRE) to show how individual decision-making is impacted by bounded rationality and noisy best responses, represented by a range of psi values in the logit QRE.  I find that player actions rely significantly less on decentralization strategies under the lottery CSF compared to the case of the all-pay auction, owing mainly to the increased exogenous noise.  Moreover, agent QRE and heterogeneous QRE approximate subgame perfect equilibria for high values of psi in the case of an all-pay auction, but under the lottery CSF, QRE is largely unresponsive to changes in psi due to the increase in exogenous noise.</p> <p><br></p> <p>Finally, I examine a potential method for introducing noise into the all-pay auction (APA) contest success function (CSF) utilized in the Colonel Blotto games of the first two chapters.  Many contests are fundamentally structured as APA, yet there is a tendency in the empirical literature to utilize a lottery CSF when stochastic outcomes are possible or the tractability of pure strategy equilibria is desired.  However, previous literature has shown that using a lottery CSF sacrifices multiple distinguishing characteristics of the APA, such as the mixed strategy equilibria described by Baye, Kovenock, and de Vries (1996), the exclusion principle of Baye, Kovenock, and de Vries (1993), and the caps on lobbying principle of Che and Gale (1998).  I overcome this by formulating an APA that incorporates noise and retains the defining characteristics of an auction by forming a convex combination of the APA and fair lottery with the risk parameter lambda.  I prove that equilibria hold by following the proofs of Baye et al. (1996, 1993) and Che and Gale (1998), and I show the new CSF satisfies the axioms of Skaperdas (1996).  While player and auctioneer actions, payments, and revenues in the noisy APA adhere closely to the those of the APA for low levels of noise, the effect of discounted expected payoffs results in lower aggregate payments and payoffs when noise is high.  Finally, I show the noisy APA is only noise equivalent to the lottery CSF when lambda = 0, i.e., the fair lottery.</p>

<p>This dissertation is a collection of three papers, each one being a chapter. The running subject of interest in all the papers is the strategic behavior of individuals in different environments. In the first chapter, I experimentally investigate collusive behavior under simultaneous interaction in multiple strategic settings, a phenomenon which I call multiple contacts. I investigate how multiple contacts impact collusive behavior when the players are symmetric or asymmetric. The second chapter is a joint work with Dr. Brian Roberson. In this chapter, we examine the role of cognitive diversity in teams on performance in a large innovation contest setting. We use a theoretical model to derive conditions under which increasing diversity can improve the performance in the large contest. Finally, in the third chapter, a joint work with Dr. Yaroslav Rosokha and Dr. Masha Shunko, we experimentally study players' behavior when they interact in an infinitely repeated environment, where the state of the world in each period is stochastic and dependent on a transition rule. Our main questions are how the transition rule impacts behavior and whether asymmetry in players impacts this.</p> <p><br></p> <p>In the first chapter, I study the phenomenon of multiple contacts using a laboratory experiment with multiple symmetric or asymmetric prisoners' dilemma games. When agents interact in multiple settings, even if defection or deviation from collusion in one setting can not be credibly punished in the same setting, it may be punishable in other settings. This can increase the incentive to collude. I observe a statistically significant increase in probability of punishment in one game after defection in another game under multiple contacts, but only when the games are asymmetric in payoffs. While punishment of defection increases in some situations, I do not find any significant increase in collusion due to multiple contacts in either symmetric or asymmetric environment. In addition to this result, to find further support for the theory which suggests that agents should use different strategies under multiple contacts, I estimate the underlying strategies that subjects use in my experiment. To this end, I modify popular strategies (e.g., Grim Trigger, Tit-for-Tat, etc.) to condition on the history observed in multiple strategic settings. I find that only for games with asymmetric payoffs subjects use these modified strategies in the presence of multiple contacts.</p> <p><br></p> <p>The second chapter is a theoretical work. In our model of large team innovation contest, teams develop an innovation using the skills or perspectives (tools) belonging to individual team members and the costly effort they provide.</p> <p>Prizes are awarded based on the values of the teams' innovations. Within a team, the team members posses different skills or perspectives (tools) which may be applied to innovation problems. For a given innovation problem and a given level of team effort, different combinations of tools within a team may generate different values for the team innovation. In this context, we examine the issues of individual team performance as a function of a team's own composition and the overall performance of the contest as a function of the compositions of the teams. We find that the question of whether increasing diversity leads to an increase in expected performance, for both an individual team and the overall contest, depends on the efficiency with which teams are able to effectively apply diverse sets of tools to innovation problems. Thus, our paper provides a channel -- other than a direct cost of diversity -- through which diversity can be beneficial or detrimental depending on how efficient teams are at utilizing diverse sets of team member tools.</p> <p><br></p> <p>The final chapter is another experimental study. We study an enviroment where individuals interact with each other in a prisoners' dilemma game repeatedly over time. However, the payoffs of the prisoners' dilemma game is decided stochastically using a transition rule. We vary the transition rule from alternation to random and study the change in subject behavior when the interaction is either symmetric or asymmetric. Our results show that in asymmetric environment, alternation can improve cooperation rates.</p> <p>With random transition rule, symmetric environment is more conducive to cooperation. We find that asymmetric environment with random transition rules performs the worst in terms of cooperation rates.</p>

Dieses Buch umfaßt die Darstellung der traditionellen und modernen mikroökonomischen Theorie; es enthält Modelle der grundlegenden ökonomischen Einheiten: Konsumenten, Produzenten und Märkte. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit wird dabei dem Oligopol zuteil, der typischen Marktform der modernen industriellen Welt. Ferner enthält das Buch Abschnitte zur Allgemeinen Gleichgewichtstheorie und zur Wohlfahrtstheorie. / This book includes the presentation of traditional and modern microeconomic theory; it contains models of the basic economic units: consumers, producers and markets. Particular attention will be given the oligopoly, the typical form of the modern industrial world market. Furthermore, the book contains sections on general equilibrium theory and welfare theory.

This thesis consists of three essays in the field of information economics. The first essay studies manipulation of information by partisan media. The recent increase in partisan media has generated interest in what drives media outlets to become more partisan. I develop a model to study the role of diffusion of information by word of mouth. In the model, a media outlet designs an information policy, which specifies the level of partisan slant in the outlet’s news reports. The news spread via a communication chain in a population of agents with heterogeneous preferences. The slant has an impact on whether the agents find the news credible and on their incentives to pass the news to others. The analysis elucidates how partisanship of media can be driven by political polarisation of the public and by the tendency of people to interact with people with similar political views. The second essay, co-authored by Jakub Redlicki, investigates falsification of scientific evidence by interest groups. We analyse a game between a biased sender (an interest group) and a decision maker (a policy maker) where the former can falsify scientific evidence at a cost. The sender observes scientific evidence and knows that it will also be observed by the decision maker unless he falsifies it. If he falsifies, then there is a chance that the decision maker observes the falsified evidence rather than the true scientific evidence. First, we investigate the decision maker’s incentives to privately acquire independent evidence, which not only provides additional information to her but can also strengthen or weaken the sender’s falsification effort. Second, we analyse the decision maker’s incentives to acquire information from the sender. The third essay analyses competition between interest groups for access to a policy maker. I study a model of lobbying in which two privately-informed experts (e.g., interest groups) with opposite goals compete for the opportunity to communicate with a policy maker. The main objective is to analyse the benefits which competition for access brings to the policy maker as opposed to hiring an expert in advance. I show that competition for access is advantageous in that it provides the policy maker with some information about the expert who did not gain access and gives the experts an incentive to invest in their communication skills. On the other hand, hiring an expert in advance allows the policy maker to use a monetary reward to incentivise the expert to invest more in his communication skills.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T13:17:35Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Fernando Daniel Garcia Fontaneti.pdf: 1193004 bytes, checksum: 1c703fe842b689f430da47dd82443658 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-06-03 / Many studies in behavioral analysis have been making use of concepts derived from the microeconomic theory of consumer demand to analyze and interpret the data obtained or simply to put the research problem forward. The present study intended to show how such concepts have been incorporated by behavior analysis in order to identify what types of approaches have been made between the two areas and what possibilities they have indicated for the development of one or both areas. Making use of key words commonly found in the consumer demand theory, a survey of articles which used concepts of the consumer demand theory was conducted in 4 journals: JEAB, JABA, Psychological Review and Behavioural Processes. 77 texts were selected for the reading of abstracts and a general characterization of the articles followed, aiming to identify the principal researchers, institutions, types of articles and, for the researches, their types (basic, applied or historic / methodological / conceptual). Among the 77 articles, a new selection was carried out for the complete reading of the articles, being 28 articles selected, which were then, read, described and classified into 5 categories, as follow: a) studies which measure the demand for reinforcers as a function of cost changes; b) studies which measure the demand for reinforcers using the concept of unit-price and/or verify how well the demand function proposed by Hursh, Raslear, Shurtfeff, Bauman e Simmons (1988) accounted for the data obtained; c) studies about the relative strength of reinforcers (relative preference) based upon their demand curves; d) experimental studies regarding changes in income; e) studies with panel data. The results of this study show the evident importance of the economic approach for the behavioral analysis, besides demonstrating, apart from restrictions, the validity of concepts of economic theory in so far as individual behavior, whether with humans or infra-humans / Muitos estudos em análise do comportamento têm utilizado conceitos derivados da teoria microeconômica da demanda do consumidor para a análise e interpretação dos dados obtidos ou, mesmo, para a colocação do problema de pesquisa. O presente trabalho pretendeu verificar como tais conceitos têm sido incorporados pela análise do comportamento, de modo a identificar que tipos de aproximações têm sido feitas entre as duas áreas e que possibilidades elas têm apontado para o avanço de uma ou ambas as áreas. Utilizando-se de palavras-chaves comumente presentes na teoria da demanda do consumidor, foi realizado levantamento de artigos que utilizaram conceitos da teoria da demanda do consumidor em 4 periódicos: JEAB, JABA, Psychological Review e Behavioural Processes. 77 textos foram selecionados para leitura de abstracts, e foi feita a caracterização geral dos estudos, buscando-se identificar principais pesquisadores, instituições, tipos de artigo e, para os relatos de pesquisa, seus tipos (básica, aplicada ou histórica / metodológica / conceitual). Dentre os 77 textos, procedeu-se a nova seleção para leitura completa dos artigos, tendo sido selecionados 28 artigos, que foram, então, lidos, descritos e classificados em 5 categorias, a saber: a) estudos que medem a demanda por em função de variações no custo; b) estudos que medem a demanda por reforçadores, utilizando-se do conceito de preço-unitário (unit price) e/ou verificam o poder explicativo da função geral da demanda nos moldes propostos por Hursh, Raslear, Shurtfeff, Bauman e Simmons (1988); c) estudos sobre força relativa de reforçadores (preferência relativa) a partir de suas curvas de demanda; d) estudos experimentais levando-se em conta variações na renda; e) estudos com painel. O resultado deste estudo aponta para a clara importância da abordagem econômica para a análise do comportamento, além de demonstrar, ainda que com restrições, a validade de conceitos da teoria econômica no âmbito do comportamento individual, seja com humanos ou infra-humanos