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This dissertation studies problems in individual and collective decision making. Chapter 1 examines how information providers may compete to influence the actions of one or many decision makers. This chapter studies a Bayesian Persuasion game with multiple senders who have access to conditionally independent experiments (and possibly others). Senders have zero-sum preferences over what information is revealed. The main results characterize when any set of states can be pooled in equilibrium and, as a consequence, when the state is (fully) revealed in every equilibrium. The state must be fully revealed in every equilibrium if and only if sender utility functions satisfy a ‘global nonlinearity’ condition. In the binary-state case, the state is fully revealed in every equilibrium if and only if some sender has nontrivial preferences. Our main takeaway is that ‘most’ zero-sum sender preferences result in full revelation. We discuss a number of extensions and variations. Chapter 2 studies Liquid Democracy (LD), a voting system which combines aspects of direct democracy (DD) and representative democracy (RD) and is becoming more widely used for collective decision making. In LD, for every decision each voter is endowed with a vote and can cast it themselves or delegate it to another voter. We study information aggregation under LD in a common-interest jury voting game with heterogenously well-informed voters. There is an incentive for a voter i to delegate to someone better informed; but delegation has a cost: if i delegates her vote, she can no longer express her own private information by voting. Delegation trades off empowering better information and making use of more information. Under some conditions, efficiency requires the number of votes held by each nondelegator to optimally reflect how well informed they are. Under efficiency LD improves welfare over DD and RD, especially in medium-sized committees. However LD also admits inefficient equilibria characterized by a small number of voters holding a large share of votes. Such equilibria can do worse than DD and can fail to aggregate information asymptotically. We discuss the implications of our results for implementing LD. For many years, psychologists have discussed the possibility of choice overload: large choice sets can be detrimental to a chooser’s wellbeing. The existence of such a phenomenon would have profound impact on both the positive and normative study of economic decision making, yet recent meta studies have reported mixed evidence. In Chapter 3, we argue that existing tests of choice overload - as measured by an increased probability of choosing a default option - are likely to be significantly under powered because ceteris parabus we should expect the default alternative to be chosen less often in larger choice sets. We propose a more powerful test based on richer data and characterization theorems for the Random Utility Model. These new approaches come with significant econometric challenges, which we show how to address. We apply the resulting tests to an exploratory data set of choices over lotteries.

The aim of this study is to examine argumentative writing produced by students of differing language backgrounds and skill level to inform future instructional approaches and program design. An archival corpus of opinion essays written by native Spanish speaking students and native English speaking students enrolled in community college developmental education courses was utilized. The essays consisted of one to two paragraphs expressing an opinion on a controversial topic. In the study, the essays were assessed for the overall persuasiveness of the text, the use of academic words, the incorporation of connectives as a measure of lexical cohesion, the use of argumentative structural elements, and the inclusion of functional elements within the text produced. The relationship between native language and six structural and lexical features were examined utilizing a one-way Multivariate Analysis of Covariance (MANCOVA). After controlling for paragraph length and reading ability, results indicated that native Spanish speaking students produced more standpoint structural elements than English speaking students. None of the other dependent variables were significant. A Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) was employed to explore the variability in the persuasiveness of the opinion writing. Utilizing this mode of analysis, it was revealed that overall persuasiveness in the students’ opinion writing was mainly a function of higher word counts, a higher percentage of academic words, more standpoint structural elements, and being a native English speaking student. Finally, pedagogical implications are discussed.

This study investigated the effect of communication competence, biological sex, and situation on compliance-gaining strategy choice. Two hypotheses and five research questions were addressed in this study. Specifically, hypothesis one predicted a positive correlation between communication competence and the likelihood of use ratings of pro-social compliance-gaining strategies. Hypothesis two predicted a negative correlation between communication competence and the likelihood of use ratings of anti-social compliance-gaining strategies. Four research questions examined differences in the likelihood of use ratings of pro- and anti-social compliance-gaining strategies according to situation (interpersonal and non-interpersonal) for male and females subjects. The last research question looked at differences in levels of communication competence for male and female subjects. Total sample size was 160, including 120 students from an introductory interpersonal communication course and 40 students from the adult, re-entry college. The Pearson correlation coefficient was used to analyze the two hypotheses as it allowed for the comparison of the strength and direction of the relationship between variables. All research questions involved the comparison of mean scores and utilized a one way analysis of variance. Results showed no correlations between communication competence and the likelihood of use ratings of pro- and anti-social compliance-gaining strategies as was predicted in the two hypotheses. The data for research questions one and two showed no significant differences in the likelihood of use ratings of pro-social compliance-gaining strategies for male and female subjects regardless of situation. However, significant differences were found in the likelihood of use ratings of anti-social compliance-gaining strategies for male and female subjects. Specifically, males exhibited a greater likelihood of use ratings of anti-social compliance-gaining strategies regardless of situation. Finally, female subjects demonstrated higher levels of communication competence than males. Some of the differences which were found between male and female subjects may be a result of a pervasive socialization process, which in essence perpetuates stereotypical roles for both men and women. Because of this socialization process, men may, indeed, be less likely to distinguish the nuances between interpersonal and non-interpersonal situations. It is suggested that future research focus on similarities between males and females as opposed to differences.

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Computer scientists are increasingly aware of the power of ubiquitous computing systems that can display information in and about the user's environment. One sub category of ubiquitous computing is persuasive ambient information systems that involve an informative display transitioning between the periphery and center of attention. The goal of this ambient technology is to produce a behavior change, implying that a display must be informative, unobtrusive, and persuasive. While a significant body of research exists on ambient technology, previous research has not fully explored the different measures to identify behavior change, evaluation techniques for linking design characteristics to visual effectiveness, nor the use of short-term goals to affect long-term behavior change. This study uses the unique context of noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) among collegiate musicians to explore these issues through developing the MIHL Reduction Feedback System that collects real-time data, translates it into visuals for music classrooms, provides predictive outcomes for goalsetting persuasion, and provides statistical measures of behavior change.