Individualism vs Collectivism in Different Cultures: A cross-cultural study

In this study, individualism vs collectivism, in line with the work of Triandis in 1985, was assessed in two groups of male and female students, in Egypt and Germany. The results confirm the effect that cultural background has on individualist vs collectivist orientations in both of these cultures for male and female students. Men and women scored higher on individualism in Germany than in Egypt, whereas collectivism scores were higher in Egypt than in Germany. These findings are discussed in terms of general recommendations for intercultural interventions that discourage viewing people solely in terms of group membership, and instead as distinct individuals.     

Constrained allocation problems with single-peaked preferences: An axiomatic analysis

We introduce a new class of problems that contains two existing classes: allocation problems with single-peaked preferences and bankruptcy problems. On this class, we analyze the implications of well-known properties such as Pareto optimality, strategy-proofness, resource-monotonicity, no-envy, equal treatment of equals, and two new properties we introduce, hierarchical no-envy and independence of nonbinding constraints. Unlike earlier literature, we consider rules that allow free-disposability. We present characterizations of a rule we introduce on this domain. We relate this rule to well-known rules on the aforementioned subdomains. Based on this relation, we present a characterization of a well-known bankruptcy rule called the constrained equal awards rule. Received: 22 June 2000/Accepted: 21 March 2002 This paper is based on the first chapter of my Ph.D. thesis submitted to the University of Rochester. I wish to thank my advisor, William Thomson, for helpful comments and suggestions.     

Intertemporal choice under timing risk: An experimental approach

This paper investigates how individuals evaluate delayed outcomes with risky realization times. Under the discounted expected utility (DEU) model, such evaluations depend only on intertemporal preferences. We obtain several testable hypotheses using the DEU model as a benchmark and test these hypotheses in three experiments. In general, our results show that the DEU model is a poor predictor of intertemporal choice behavior under timing risk. We found that individuals are averse to timing risk and that they evaluate timing lotteries in a rank-dependent fashion. The main driver of timing risk aversion is nothing but probabilistic risk aversion that stems from the nonlinear treatment of probabilities.     

Sektion Jugendsoziologie Tätigkeitsbericht 2004

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Interpersonal dependency of preferences

Standard decision theoretic models disregard the phenomenon of interpersonal dependency of preferences. In this paper it is argued that interpersonal dependency of preferences is a serious challenge for standard utility theory. First we sketch the more philosophical aspects of the problem and then, using a simple, formal model for the two-person case, we show that interpersonal dependency of preferences generally results in indeterminacy of preferences (resp. of subjective utility).     

Two point priors and Γ-minimax estimating in families of uniform distributions

It is shown that when a parameter lying in a sufficiently small interval is to be estimated in a family of uniform distributions, a two point prior is least favourable under squared error loss. The unique Bayes estimator with respect to this prior is minimax. The Γ-minimax estimator is derived for sets Γ of priors consisting of all priors that give fixed probabilities to two specified subintervals of the parameter space if a two point prior is least favourable in Γ.