The first essay of this dissertation explores the role of congressional politics in environmental law enforcements in the United States. It examines if and to what extent the political affiliation of a representative politician matters for the enforcement of the Clean Air Act (CAA); in particular whether the affiliation of a representative politician to a particular party results in a higher/lower level of enforcement in his/her constituency. The period of 1989 to 2005 is considered. The analysis shows that political processes at the local, state and federal level did matter for facility level enforcements. By and large, the Republican politicians tended to reduce facility level inspections compared to their Democrat counterparts and the magnitude of such reduction marginally increased with the seniority of the Republican politicians----a finding that has important policy implications. As a result the political affiliation of a politician emerges as a key instrument for environmental enforcement in the emissions equation.The second essay studies the potential issue of contagion in individual honesty (or, dishonesty). When an individual believes that peers are predominantly untruthful (or, truthful) in a given situation, is he/she more likely to be untruthful (or, truthful) in that situation in absence of monitoring, social sanction and reputation formation? The analysis employs an asymmetric information deception game patterned after Gneezy (2005) and reaches at the conclusion that individuals are heavily (partly) contagious when they believe that peers are predominantly dishonest (honest). The conclusion sheds some light on one of the many individual level root causes as to why the world is bipolar in the distribution of corruption (with most countries are either highly corrupt or highly honest).The third essay discusses the complementarity that existed between the diffusion of motor vehicles usage and the construction of the network of roads in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. With the expansion of roads, communication between two destinations became smoother, faster and more convenient and in turn attracted more and more people to use motor vehicles as a medium of communication. We empirically investigate how the expansion of the network of roads resulted in the diffusion of motor vehicles. We plan to empirically explore the impact of the diffusion of motor vehicles usage on the expansion of the road network in our future work. The complementarity that existed between the diffusion of motor vehicles and the expansion of roads in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century has important policy implications for today's developing countries that do not have a well constructed network of roads.

Research in judgement and decision-making has identified numerous ways in which human decisions are likely to be biased, deviating systematically from the behaviour one would expect if humans were fully rational 'Econs', maximizing their utility with perfect self-control. Suboptimal decision-making as a result of these biases imposes large costs on individuals and society. In this thesis I investigate experimentally how decision-making can be improved, focusing on the health domain, where errors ultimately become a matter of life and death. Chapter 1: Providing feedback has been shown to be an effective way to change behaviour across several domains, including energy use and the workplace. However, there is little evidence on the effect of providing feedback in high stakes environments, where people make risky decisions with potentially catastrophic losses. In the first chapter I conduct a field experiment that provides feedback and information in such a context - emergency healthcare. Understanding the drivers of patients' decision-making relating to their demand for healthcare services and how they can be directed to the most appropriate services at any given time is a challenge for health systems across many countries. This trial aimed to reduce avoidable Emergency Department (A&E) attendances by sending a personal feedback letter to people who recently attended an Emergency Department but whose health concerns could have been dealt with elsewhere. Patients were randomly allocated to either receive a follow-up letter with information on alternatives to A&E or no letter (usual care). Overall, I do not find a statistically significant difference between the re-attendance rates of patients who did and did not receive the letters. However, the effect of the intervention interacted significantly with patient age, especially in men. I develop a conceptual framework that explores possible explanations for these heterogeneous effects. Chapter 2: Policy interventions drawing on insights from behavioural sciences are increasingly popular and have been successfully applied across a number of different policy areas. However, little attention has been paid to the extent to which the effects of repeated behavioural interventions are sustained over time. In the second chapter I study this question through a natural field experiment in the English National Health Service (NHS). The intervention consists of changing the salience of waiting time on the clinicians' e-Referral Service (ERS) interface. Waiting longer can negatively affect patients' health gains from receiving treatment, so referring patients to services with shorter waiting times can be of benefit. I find, through a stepped wedge trial, that putting a simple alert against services with high waiting times leads to a 35 percent reduction in the share of referrals to these services. The effect of the intervention is sustained over time and does not vary with prior referral habits. A small, low-cost intervention increasing the salience of waiting time to clinicians has a powerful and sustained effect on the choices of their patients. Chapter 3: Behavioural attitudes toward risk and time, as well as behavioural biases such as present bias, are thought to be important drivers of unhealthy lifestyle choices. While the first two chapters of this thesis take behavioural biases as given, the third chapter makes a first attempt at exploring the possibility of training the mind to alter these attitudes and biases, in particular relating to health-related behaviours, using a randomized controlled experiment. The intervention we consider is a well-known psychological technique called "mindfulness", which is believed to improve self-control and reduce stress. We conduct an experiment with 139 participants, around half of whom receive a four-week mindfulness training, while the other half are asked to watch a four-week series of historical documentaries. We find strong evidence that mindfulness training reduces perceived stress, but only weak evidence of its impact on behavioural traits and health-related behaviours. We do not see that engagement with mindfulness training is correlated with behavioural characteristics such as impulsiveness and impatience. Our findings have significant implications for a new domain of research on training the mind to alter behavioural traits and biases that play important roles in lifestyle.

This dissertation consists of three essays which make use of laboratory experiments in order to investigate how procedural or contextual factors impact human behavior. / Economics

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This dissertation is an investigation into the determinants of demand for service contracts on new vehicles. In the first chapter, I characterize the consumer decision to buy a service contract with a discrete choice model. Hypotheses and conjectures are tested empirically using survey data from new vehicle buyers. The second chapter consists of the development and testing of an instrument for measuring attitudes toward uncertainty. This tool is useful in gauging aversion toward weak ambiguity. Finally, in the third chapter, I use additional survey and experimental data from new vehicle buyers to further differentiate between the factors that significantly affect the service contract purchase decision. A variety of uncertainty measures and their predictive powers are discussed. I would like to thank the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Network on Preferences and Norms, for their generous financial support, which was indispensable to the completion of this research. / Ph. D.

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<div>In this dissertation I present three essays. The overarching theme of these projects is how price-discriminating sellers endogenously modify their pricing schemes in the face of regulatory interventions. The application I have in mind when writing the papers is that of a food retailer deciding menu characteristics, such as price and quantity, in the context of a given food policy environment. The particular policies I consider are portion cap rules and taxes, both designed by the policy-maker to reduce the consumption of certain foods and ingredients. My approach diverges from studies focusing on buyers' reactions to paternalistic food policies by placing the seller at the center of the analysis. I use models of nonlinear pricing to derive hypotheses, which I test in controlled laboratory experiments. In the first two essays I explore the economic impacts of taxes and portion cap rules when single-product sellers serve privately informed buyers. In the third, I examine the economic effects of portion cap rules when two-product sellers serve buyers with private preferences. </div><div><br></div><div>In the first essay, collective work with Dr. Joseph Balagtas and Dr. Steven Wu, I compare the impacts of taxes and portion control rules on profit and consumer surplus. I model the pricing problem of a single-product seller serving two types of privately-informed customers. I aim to answer the following questions: i) what effects do taxes have on portion sizes, buyer surplus, and seller's expected profit; ii) how does the tax affect the seller's ability to screen the market, and iii) how the effects of taxes and portion cap rules compare. I find that under a tax regime, all package sizes are smaller; high willingness to pay buyers see a reduction in their surplus, and the retailer's expected profit is unambiguously diminished. Both policy instruments curb consumption. In contrast with tax regimes, however, cap rules leave buyer surplus unaffected. These outcomes suggest that portion control rules might be a preferred over tax regimes as methods to regulate consumption of calorie-dense and low-nutrient foods traded in settings where retailers engage in second-degree price discrimination.</div><div><br></div><div>In the second paper, also joint work with Dr. Joseph Balagtas and Dr. Steven Wu, I report a controlled laboratory experiment designed to test the results of my first essay. In this project, human subjects take on the role of sellers and are free to decide their pricing strategies, including number of ``packages'', their price and their quantity. We vary the policy environment across treatments,and these include: unregulated baseline, cap rule, and specific tax. My principal goal is to test the theoretical outcomes of the first essay and find which regulation is associated with a smaller negative impact on consumers' economic surplus in the laboratory. My main finding is that the cap does not impact buyers' information rents regardless of the seller's segmentation scheme; while the effect of the tax is contingent on the seller's strategy and is neutral at best.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>In the last essay, I study the economic impacts resulting from enforcing a maximum-quantity limit on one of the two products offered by a seller facing demand from privately-informed heterogeneous buyers. Specifically, I look at impacts on: i) consumption of the regulated component, ii) purchases of the unregulated item, and iii) consumer surplus. Hypotheses derived from a bi-dimensional nonlinear pricing predict reductions in consumption of the target component, changes in consumption of the unregulated product by some buyers, and mixed impacts on consumer surplus. Data from a laboratory experiment corroborates the predictions regarding consumption of the regulated good; however, no significant changes in consumption of the unregulated product are found, surprisingly a subset of buyers are better-off after the cap rule while no buyer type is worse-off. The results have implications for food policy discussions around portion cap rules, where the assumption that these regulations negatively impact consumers' well-being largely drives public debate. </div>

This project investigates states' strategies in the management of contentious interstate disputes asking why disputants select a particular approach, or forum, to serve as the stage for negotiations. The conflict bargaining process reveals incentives to reach peaceful solutions to war, but peace may be elusive due to bilateral bargaining problems (Fearon 1995; Schelling 1960). In general, third parties provide a useful service in interstate conflict management. However, not all third parties equally benefit the bargaining process. Recent research especially points to the efficacy of legal dispute resolution, such as arbitration and adjudication. The robustness of these results over different types of conflicts and disputants provides a clear prescription for substantive dispute resolution: If states are sincere about peacefully resolving conflicts, then the best way to achieve that - in terms of probability of reaching a settlement and ensuring compliance - is to submit to legal management fora. Despite the strength of this prescription, states rarely submit to legal dispute resolution. A majority of the time states, instead, negotiate bilaterally. Alternatively, they turn to one of the other, useful, but less effective forms of third party management, such as mediation. Drawing on these observations, the specific puzzle this dissertation addresses is why states avoid the types of conflict management that have been demonstrated empirically to be highly effective at resolving conflicts. In response to this puzzle, this dissertation defines a conflict management forum as as a venue for the substantive settlement of interstate conflicts, which is characterized by three different features: transparency, decision control, and expectations about distributional outcomes. This definition then serves as the basis for two formal bargaining models that explain forum selection in interstate conflict management. Empirical implications from these models were tested through a set of three laboratory experiments conducted at the University of Iowa. Through this series of theoretical models and experimental analyses, this project suggests that states select management fora that best balance their capabilities and interests. The features of a conflict management forum, which include decision control, transparency, and distributional biases, directly affect the outcome and long-term viability of negotiated settlements. States' ability to manipulate these features is an important part of the conflict bargaining process. In conclusion, the dissertation provides three answers to the motivating puzzle: States select management fora in order to balance power asymmetries and to enhance commitment to settlement, to identify focal points for settlement negotiations, and to break stalemates that could lead to violent breakdowns.