Intergenerational cooperation within the household: a Public Good game with three generations

We analyze cooperation of individuals in a family context, using a Public Good game. In a lab experiment, 165 individuals from 55 three-generation families (youth, parent, and grandparent) play a repeated Public Good game in three different treatments: one in which three members of the same family play each other (family), a second with the youth and two non-family members, while preserving the previous generational structure (inter-generational), and a third in which three randomly-selected players play each other (random). We find that all the age groups cooperate more when playing with relatives, indicating that family ties may have a positive relationship to contributions to the Public Good. We also find that this trend is more evident for the youths and the parents than for the grandparents. Furthermore, young individuals tend to cooperate less than older generations, especially in non-family treatments. Our results serve as evidence of the relationship between family ties and inter-generational cooperative behaviors.

     

Some results on optimality in models with heteroscedastic errors from partial optimum designs

This paper studies optimum designs for linear models when the errors are heteroscedastic. Sufficient conditions are given in order to obtainD-, A- andE-optimum designs for a complete regression model from partial optimum designs for some sub-parameters. A result about optimality for a complete model from the optimality for the submodels is included. Supported by Junta de Andalucía, research group FQM244.     

Sexual Practices Among a Sample of Young Lesbian and Bisexual Women from Mexico: An Exploratory Study

Objective: To describe sexual practices in Mexican lesbian and bisexual women. Materials and method: An online survey was conducted with a nonprobabilistic sample of self-identified lesbian (n?=?768) and bisexual (n?=?371) women from the 32 states of Mexico. Results: Lesbians less frequently reported having had sex with a man than bisexual women. Preferred sexual practices with other women were external genital stimulation with fingers, internal genital stimulation with fingers, and oral genital stimulation. Most (～80%) participants did not use protection to prevent sexually transmitted infections. Conclusions: Our results can inform the design of promotion and prevention programs in sexual health aimed at sexual minority women.     

Berk–Nash Equilibrium: A Framework for Modeling Agents With Misspecified Models

We develop an equilibrium framework that relaxes the standard assumption that people have a correctly specified view of their environment. Each player is characterized by a (possibly misspecified) subjective model, which describes the set of feasible beliefs over payoff‐relevant consequences as a function of actions. We introduce the notion of a Berk–Nash equilibrium: Each player follows a strategy that is optimal given her belief, and her belief is restricted to be the best fit among the set of beliefs she considers possible. The notion of best fit is formalized in terms of minimizing the Kullback–Leibler divergence, which is endogenous and depends on the equilibrium strategy profile. Standard solution concepts such as Nash equilibrium and self‐confirming equilibrium constitute special cases where players have correctly specified models. We provide a learning foundation for Berk–Nash equilibrium by extending and combining results from the statistics literature on misspecified learning and the economics literature on learning in games.     

Gamson’s law and hedonic games

This note adds one celebrated coalition formation game due to Gamson (Am Soc Rev 26:373–382 1961a, Am Soc Rev 26:565–573, 1961b) in the list of applications of the theory of hedonic games explored by Banerjee et al. (Soc Choice Welf 18:135–153, 2001) and Bogomolnaia and Jackson (Games Econ Behav 38: 204–230, 2002). We apply their results to study the original Gamson game and offer extensions both to a multi-dimensional characteristics space and to an infinite number of players.     

The weight of the rich: improving surveys using tax data

The Journal of Economic Inequality - Household surveys often fail to capture the top tail of income and wealth distributions, as evidenced by studies based on tax data. Yet to date there is no...     

Methodology for the Calculation of Annualized Incremental Risks in Systems of Dams

In the past few years, the field of dam safety has approached risk informed methodologies throughout the world and several methodologies and programs are appearing to aid in the systematization of the calculations. The most common way of implementing these calculations is through the use of event trees, computing event probabilities, and incremental consequences. This methodology is flexible enough for several situations, but its generalization to the case of systems of several dams is complex and its implementation in a completely general calculation methodology presents some problems. Retaining the event tree framework, a new methodology is proposed to calculate incremental risks. The main advantage of this proposed methodology is the ease with which it can be applied to systems of several dams: with a single risk model that describes the complete system and with a single calculation the incremental risks of the system can be obtained, being able to allocate the risk of each dam and of each failure mode. The article shows how both methodologies are equivalent and also applies them to a case study.     

Testing the Martingale Difference Hypothesis

In this paper we consider testing that an economic time series follows a martingale difference process. The martingale difference hypothesis has typically been tested using information contained in the second moments of a process, that is, using test statistics based on the sample autocovariances or periodograms. Tests based on these statistics are inconsistent since they cannot detect nonlinear alternatives. In this paper we consider tests that detect linear and nonlinear alternatives. Given that the asymptotic distributions of the considered tests statistics depend on the data generating process, we propose to implement the tests using a modified wild bootstrap procedure. The paper theoretically justifies the proposed tests and examines their finite sample behavior by means of Monte Carlo experiments.     

Dynamic evolution of alliance portfolios

This research advances in the conceptualization and the operationalization of the factors or microdynamics that determine the choice of partners. Most of the literature in this area of research has centered on the individual alliance without taking into account the set of alliances that a firm makes. This research applies a holistic approach, analyzing the set of alliances as a whole and points to the factors related to alliance portfolios that affect the choice of partners. The authors propose a longitudinal model that allows us to analyze the evolution of interorganizational networks. A Simulation Investigation for Empirical Network Analysis (SIENA) has been applied to a sample of 229 firms, analyzing 10,556 strategic alliances established between them over a 12 year period. The results show that certain factors over which managers exercise a degree of control (deliberate endogenous microdynamics) exert significant influences on the choice of partners by the focal actor and thereby on the dynamic configuration of alliance portfolios.     

A-optimal designs for heteroscedastic multifactor regression models

Abstract

This paper searches for A-optimal designs for Kronecker product and additive regression models when the errors are heteroscedastic. Sufficient conditions are given so that A-optimal designs for the multifactor models can be built from A-optimal designs for their sub-models with a single factor. The results of an efficiency study carried out to check the adequacy of the products of optimal designs for uni-factor marginal models when these are used to estimate different multi-factor models are also reported.