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In this thesis, I explore a number of epistemological issues concerning the relations between knowledge, belief and practical matters. In particular, I defend a view, which I call credal pragmatism. This view is compatible with moderate invariantism, a view that takes knowledge to depend exclusively on truth-relevant factors and to require an invariant epistemic standard of knowledge that can be quite easily met. The thesis includes a negative and a positive part. In the negative part (Ch. 1-4) I do two things: i) I critically examine some moderate invariantist accounts of the intuitive influence of practical factors on knowledge ascriptions, and ii) I provide a criticism of the idea that knowledge is the norm of practical reasoning. In Chapter 1, I provide a general overview of the issues that constitute the background for the views and arguments defended in my thesis. In particular, I provide a thorough discussion of two aspects of the relation between knowledge and practical matters: one is constituted by the practical factors' effects on knowledge ascriptions; the other is the intuitive normative role of knowledge in the regulation and assessments of action and practical reasoning. In Chapter 2, I consider and criticize Timothy Williamson's account according to which an alleged failure to acknowledge the distinction between knowing and knowing that one knows generates the intuition that knowledge ascriptions are sensitive to practical factors. In Chapter 3, I argue against the idea that practical reasoning is governed by a knowledge norm. The argument generalizes to other candidate epistemic norms of practical reasoning. In Chapter 4, I criticise a number of accounts which explain effects of practical factors on knowledge ascriptions in terms of the influence of practical factors on belief. These include the accounts of Brain Weatherson, Dorit Ganson, Kent Bach and Jennifer Nagel. In the positive part of the thesis (Ch. 5-6), I develop and argue for credal pragmatism, an original account of the nature and interaction of different doxastic attitudes and the role of practical factors in their rational regulation. On this view, given a certain fixed amount of evidence, the degree of credence of an adaptively rational agent varies in different circumstances depending on practical factors, while the threshold on the degree of credence necessary for outright belief remains fixed across contexts. This account distinguishes between two kinds of outright belief: occurrent belief, which depends on the actual degree of credence, and dispositional belief, which depends on the degree of credence in normal circumstances. In Chapter 5, I present the view and I show how credal pragmatism can explain the practical factors' effects on knowledge ascriptions. In Chapter 6, I develop a fallibilist account of several features about knowledge ascriptions including i) why in folk epistemological practices knowledge is often taken to be a necessary and sufficient epistemic condition for relying on a proposition in practical reasoning; ii) concessive knowledge attributions and related data; and iii) the infallibilist intuition that knowledge excludes error possibilities.

This research examines consumer preferences for certification of select credence attributes by different certifying agents. Over two separate study periods, groups of Edmonton consumers participated in sessions comprised of three components a real choice experiment, a stated preference exercise and a survey designed to elicit willingness to pay for select credence attributes of eggs, certification of those attributes and establish attitudes and beliefs that may affect preferences. Results indicate that consumer shopping habits, overall trust levels and certain demographic characteristics influence the preference for an attribute as well as the preference for certification of that attribute. Survey respondents prefer certified to uncertified eggs and government is the preferred certifier. Pasteurized eggs gained the most from certification. Furthermore, an assessment of respondent knowledge about current certification practices indicates that certification schemes be accompanied by an adequate education campaign.

This dissertation comprises three chapters. The first chapter develops a research design to estimate the causal effect of parental layoffs and income during adolescence on children's college outcomes, and implements this design on administrative data for the United States. The design compares outcomes of children whose fathers lose jobs before college decisions with outcomes of children whose fathers lose jobs after college decisions. I find that layoffs and unanticipated income losses during adolescence have very small adverse effects on future college outcomes. These effects are smaller than estimates in prior work based on firm closures rather than timing of layoffs. I replicate these larger estimates and show they are driven by selection of workers into closing firms. The findings suggest that relaxing parental liquidity constraints during adolescence will do little to increase enrollment compared to improvements in financial aid, especially for low-income children. The second chapter, written with my advisor and other colleagues, shows that classroom quality in early childhood has large causal impacts on adult outcomes, and that test score gains can help to identify classroom quality even when these gains fade out over time. We first link administrative data to records from Project STAR, in which 11,571 students in Tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade. We then document four sets of experimental impacts. First, students in small classes are more likely to attend college and exhibit improvements on other outcomes. Second, students who had a more experienced teacher in kindergarten have higher earnings. Third, students who were randomly assigned to higher quality classrooms in grades K-3 -- as measured by classmates' end-of-class test scores -- have higher earnings, college attendance rates, and other outcomes. Finally, the effects of class quality fade out on test scores in later grades but gains in non-cognitive measures persist. The third chapter explores theoretical properties of markets for "credence goods." Credence goods such as health care involve consumer reliance on expert diagnosis. When consumers observe expert cost functions, competitive markets tend strongly toward efficiency. I argue that consumers do not observe expert cost functions and extend an existing model to incorporate this insight. The key result is that prices and competition no longer eliminate mistreatment. / Economics

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In the first chapter, I investigate reputational effects of the disclosure of negative information in a market affected by adverse selection. A series of recent discoveries has increased consumer concern over the presence of counterfeits in the market for fine and rare wine. For the thousands of bottles sold at auction each year, house reputation is used as a quality assurance mechanism to signal product authenticity. Using sales data from 2005-2015 for the ten largest auction houses, I study consumer reaction following two recent disclosures of an auction house having offered or sold counterfeit wine. My identification strategy to examine reputation involves a series of triple difference regressions analyzing equilibrium prices and quantities. I discover one house experienced no losses following a 2008 incident involving 107 counterfeit bottles. However, three houses associated with a 2012 incident involving thousands of bottles were found to have suffered significant reputation losses following the incident. These losses are demonstrated by a 3-8% decrease in equilibrium sales prices and a 6-9% decrease in sales quantities in the year following the disclosure. The second chapter of my dissertation involves the transitivity of stated preferences. Revealed preference theory states that, in order for an individual’s preferences to be consistent with utility maximization, they must satisfy the principle of transitivity. Any deviations from this principle result in a logically inconsistent response pattern. I develop a new framework to study the rationality of stated preferences, accounting for both the number and severity of non-transitive responses an individual makes. I implement this method using a nationally representative survey of 3,234 respondents from the U.S. general population and discover that more than 52% of the population exhibit non-transitive preferences. In addition to measuring the number and severity of non-transitive preferences exhibited by each respondent, another aim of this manuscript is to evaluate the relationship between response transitivity and the individual outcomes of each respondent under the premise that high quality decisions are the result of greater decision-making ability. After controlling for demographic characteristics including age, education, race, gender, ethnicity, and work status, non-transitive patterns are correlated with lower incomes and poorer health.

Little is known about how people evaluate credence attributes, that is, those attributes which the consumer often cannot fully evaluate even after purchasing and consuming the product. And yet consumers struggle to evaluate quality in several important product categories dominated by credence attributes such as food safety, medical services, legal services, and pharmaceuticals, among others. The dissertation explores the processes by which people form quality evaluations of services high in credence attributes and the consequences of those evaluations. Drawing on the service quality, dual-process social information processing, expert-novice and risk literatures, I develop a conceptual model to illustrate how skill and motivation moderate the ways people seek and integrate observable information to infer unobservable quality. The influence of quality evaluations on outcome, satisfaction, value, and loyalty is mapped. The model is tested in the context of a classic credence service, health care services with two large datasets using structural equation modeling. Study 1 draws on an existing patient satisfaction database (6,280 records) to measure the sources and consequences of quality evaluations. Study 2 validates Study 1 findings and extends those findings to show the moderating roles of product expertise and perceived risk on quality evaluation processes. The second study is tested with 1,379 consumers (patients) drawn from an online consumer panel. The research suggests service quality in this context refers narrowly to the attributes of the core product (here, the physician‘s medical competence); interpersonal and organizational quality are associated with value, satisfaction and loyalty, rather than overall quality. Two paths to quality evaluations appear to exist. In the first, consumers integrate evidence of the physician‘s capabilities, practices, and prior outcomes to reach evaluations of technical quality. In the second path, consumers rely on a trust heuristic in which observed interpersonal and organizational quality signals are used to build trust in the physician; that trust, in turn, influences perceptions of technical quality. The trust heuristic appears to be used when the stakes are low and, counterintuitively, when the stakes are high, just when superior evaluations are most needed.

A cross-sectional design was utilized to analyze data from 762 U.S. beef consumers surveyed in May 2015. The objective of the survey was to obtain an understanding of how consumers in the Millennial, X, and Boom Generations value beef credence labels with regard to level of importance and willingness to pay (WTP). The survey was created using LimeSurvey, and pilot tested at the following three universities: Southern Illinois University, Iowa State University, and Tarleton State University prior to submitting it to the C & T Marketing group across the United States in May 2015. The survey also included the following components: generational differences in beef consumption, other animal protein source consumption and sources of information utilized regarding beef. Demographics collected were used to separate respondents into the following generational categories: Millennial (18-33 years old), X (34-54 years old), and Boom (55-72 years old), and consumers represented 42 states of the U.S. plus the District of Columbia. Twelve credence labels were statistically different (P < 0.05) in their levels of importance based on generation cohort. Specifically, some credence labels significantly important to the Boom generation compared to X or Millennial generation were: Raised in the USA (P < 0.001), Product of the USA (P < 0.001) and Raised without Antibiotics (P < 0.001). However, Millennials reported higher averages (P < 0.001) in their WTP for credence attributes that contained the word “organic” in some way. Even though these labels showed significance, results indicated that respondents would be willing to pay below the current market value ($10.39) for a 12 ounce Choice Beef Ribeye Steak. Furthermore, Millennials are consuming the most beef at home among the three generations with consumption at more than two to four times per week. Beef is consumed more often that poultry, pork and seafood in a restaurant. Overall, beef consumers are primarily using online resources to obtain beef information, however; consumers still value information gathered from peer interaction, beef farmers, and butchers. Beef consumers from different generations have varying opinions on what beef credence labels are important to them, and what price they are willing to pay for those labels. However, this study would suggest organic beef is important to beef consumers, but they are not willing to pay for that particular credence label.

Konkurrensen mellan företag blir allt hårdare i dagens samhälle och därav är det är viktigt för företag att utveckla konkurrenskraftiga varumärken med en tydlig inriktning. En strategi för att differentiera sitt varumärke är att utveckla en passande varumärkespersonlighet, vilket definierats är en uppsättning mänskliga egenskaper som förknippas med varumärket. Denna studie använder Aakers (1997) välkända ramverk som utgår från att varumärken huvudsakligen kan besitta en av dessa fem varumärkespersonligheter: uppriktig, spännande, kompetent, sofistikerad eller robust. Denna studie är inriktad på visuella symbolers färg och form, dessa faktorer har valts ut eftersom de har stark inverkan på hur varumärkespersonligheten uppfattas. För att till viss del kunna fylla ett forskningsgap är studien riktad till företag som tillhandahåller credence-tjänster, där konsumenter inte kan bedöma produktens kvalité vare sig innan eller efter köpet utan en större kostnad. Studien kan tillföra specificerad teoretisk kunskap inom de aktuella ämnena samt praktiskt bidra med information till marknadsföringsavdelningar genom ökad förståelse för konsumenters preferenser och uppfattningar av loggors färg och form samt varumärkespersonligheter. Studiens syfte är således att skapa förståelse för hur konsumenter uppfattar varumärkespersonligheter inom credence-tjänster beroende på den visuella loggans färg och form, arbetet avgränsas till reparationstjänster. Detta arbete följer ett positivistiskt paradigm med en kvantitativ datainsamlingsmetod och tillämpar ett deduktivt angreppssätt med induktiva inslag. För att besvara forskningsfrågan har ett antal hypoteser framtagits som testas genom en experimentell enkätundersökning. I enkäten fick respondenter illustrerat loggor med neutral design i färgerna röd, gul, blå, lila och grön samt fick välja mellan olika egenskaper från de fem varumärkespersonligheterna som de ansåg passa bäst ihop med varje logga. Respondenternas uppfattning av loggorna testades först utan ett produktsammanhang och därefter i ett credence-sammanhang, där respondenterna fick ett angivet reparationsscenario och välja mellan loggor i de nämnda färgerna samt i kantig och rund form. Studiens hypoteser har testats statistiskt med hjälp av logistisk regression, chi2-test och bivariate probit regression. Resultatet från testerna presenteras för varje enskild hypotes för att kunna dra generella slutsatser om respondenternas uppfattning. Studiens resultat visar att loggans färg har betydelse för uppfattad varumärkespersonlighet. Respondenternas uppfattning av loggorna i ett credence-kontext antyder att de generellt ansåg att blå logga är associerad med kompetent personlighet, grön logga med uppriktig personlighet och röd logga med spännande personlighet. De lila och gula loggorna valdes av väldigt få respondenter som mest lämpliga till reparationsscenariot och därför utfördes ingen utförlig undersökning av dessa färger. Detta resultat från ett credence-kontext skiljde sig en del från resultatet då loggorna inte presenterades i ett produktsammanhang, resultaten var olika för bland annat röd färg. Denna studie har inte kunnat bevisa att det finns ett samband med hjälp av chi2-test mellan någon av de utvalda färgerna och kantig eller rund form. Kantiga loggor associeras dock till robust personlighet och rund form till uppriktig personlighet. Gröna och röda loggor anses av en del personer vara passande till reparationstjänster. Tidigare studier har visat att röd är en svårplacerad färg och kan variera beroende på sammanhanget, denna studie bekräftar detta. Grön färg kan associeras med moral och ärlighet, det är förståeligt att respondenter eftersöker dessa egenskaper i ett credence-sammanhang. Studiens slutsats är att kompetent personlighet är att föredra för företag med credence-attribut, då stor del av respondenterna ansåg att blå färg var mest lämplig och att den var associerad till kompetens.

About a decade ago, Adam Elga introduced philosophers to an intriguing puzzle. In it, Sleeping Beauty, a perfectly rational agent, undergoes an experiment in which she becomes ignorant of what time it is. This situation is puzzling for two reasons: First, because there are two equally plausible views about how she will change her degree of belief given her situation and, second, because the traditional rules for updating degrees of belief don't seem to apply to this case. In this dissertation, my goals are to settle the debate concerning this puzzle and to offer a new rule for updating some types of degrees of belief. Regarding the puzzle, I will defend a view called "the Lesser view," a view largely favorable to the Thirders' position in the traditional debate on the puzzle. Regarding the general rule for updating, I will present and defend a rule called "Shifted Jeffrey Conditionalization." My discussions of the above view and rule will complement each other: On the one hand, I defend the Lesser view by making use of Shifted Jeffrey Conditionalization. On the other hand, I test Shifted Jeffrey Conditionalization by applying it to various credal transitions in the Sleeping Beauty problem and revise that rule in accordance with the results of the test application. In the end, I will present and defend an updating rule called "General Shifted Jeffrey Conditionalization," which I suspect is the general rule for updating one's degrees of belief in so-called tensed propositions.