Trust and financial trades: Lessons from an investment game where reciprocators can hide behind probabilities

This paper shows that if a very small, exogenously given probability of terminating the exchange is introduced in an elementary investment game, more reciprocators will choose the defection strategy. Everything happens as if they “hide behind probabilities” in order to break the trust relationship. Investors do not alter their behavior in a significant way, at least not for a very small external risk. Financial assets all come with a predetermined and contractual probability that by the time when the buyer has to receive the reward for his investment, “bad luck” might have brought the asset value down to zero. In the light of the experimental findings, such trades would not provide a favorable environment for building trust.     

Wife's role in monthly insurance expenditures

This study investigates the wife's role in monthly insurance expenditures of couples who have been married almost 13 years. Although previous research has shown that husbands dominate decisions about insurance, this study indicates that wives are involved in monthly expenditures for insurance. A wife's involvement is greater if she is less sex-role traditional, if her earnings are lower, if her husband's earnings are lower, if her husband's parents shared financial roles, if she perceives that net worth increased over the past 3 years, if she expects finances to be worse off in 3 years, and if she has a high school diploma or less. Involvement also increases with increases in number of children. Further research is essential in enhancing women's economic well-being.This study was a part of Project No. 60-0362 of the Agricultural Experiment Station, College of Agriculture, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. University of Illinois Survey Research Laboratory services were used in preparation of the data tapes. The author wishes to thank Lauren J. Leach for assistance with data preparation.Vicki Schram Fitzsimmons is Assistant Professor, Division of Family & Consumer Economics, University of Illinois, 905 S. Goodwin Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801. Her research areas include family financial management, economic well-being, and household production. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois.     

Socioeconomic,sociodemographic and attitudinal correlates of the tempo of divorce

The association between sociodemographic, demographic, and attitudinal measures and the timing or tempo of marital dissolution over a 14-year time span is examined. Separation is considered equivalent to divorce. Early and late divorce are differentiated by whether the event occurred before or after the average number of years married prior to divorce. Data were obtained on husbands and wives within childbearing years (up to 39 years) in the 1st years of the 1st marriage. A random stratified sample of 610 couples was drawn from records of marriages in a midwestern county between 1972-77. Reinterviews were conducted on 544 couples in April 1985. socioeconomic variables included educational attainment, occupational prestige, wife's employment status, wife's future work plans, husband's attitude to wife's future work plans, total family income, and level of satisfaction with current financial status. Demographic variables are age at marriage, number of children in 1985, marital duration, and desired family size. Attitudinal items were religiosity and gender role orientations (traditionalism, modernism, egalitarianism). Exposure to divorce was not equitably distributed for the 108 who divorced, but this was not statistically significant. The results indicate that those divorced earlier were wives who worked outside the home, worked at more prestigious jobs, planned to be employed throughout married life, and whose father had a higher level of educational attainment. This finding is not consistent with prior research which has shown that favorable socioeconomic conditions lower the probability of divorce. The timing of divorce was affected by the presence of children. Those married at younger ages divorced earlier and couples with children delayed divorcing longer than couples without children. These findings were consistent with earlier research. Catholic wives delayed divorce longer than non-Catholic wives. Males lower in sexual satisfaction divorced earlier. Divorce was postponed longer for husbands with traditional values and wives who had higher scores on egalitarianism. Wives with scores on modernism had earlier divorces than wives scoring lower on modernism. The tempo of divorce was in multiple classification analysis predicted best by wife's employment status and number of children. Cross-classification was not possible.     

Male pressure in the decision to remain childfree

To examine the negotiations and resolutions of disagreement over childlessness (the childfree lifestyle), questionnaires were sent to 100 married couples drawn randomly from membership lists of the National Organization for Non-Parents (NON). Responses of 40 couples were analyzed, in a synthesized theoretical framework drawn from Thibaut and Kelley (1959) and sex role socialization theory. The pattern that emerged was: if it was the husband's decision to remain childfree and not the wife's at first, she was likely to come into agreement with him; if it was the wife's decision to remain childfree, only very rarely would the husband consent. The more likely result, if she remained adamant, was divorce. Because marital power was so much greater for the husbands, the childfree life-style as an alterntive marital form may not differ greatly from traditional marital patterns. Author's Note: An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, Chicago, September 1977. I am indebted to Dr. Roger Libby for his helpful comments, and to the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions.     

Determinants of Women's Decision-Making Authority in Nigeria: The Ethnic Dimension

Using data from a 1991 survey of five ethnic groups in Nigeria, we look at the determinants of wife's decision-making authority. Our analysis shows that ethnicity plays a very important role in shaping wife's decision-making authority and is even more important than wife's individual-level characteristics as a determinant of authority. The ethnic effect occurs both by shaping the levels of resources that women achieve and by shaping the relationships of wife's achieved characteristics to family decision-making. To the extent that characteristics other than ethnicity make a difference for authority, we find that wife's contributions to household expenditures are important. That factor significantly increases wife's authority, as does wife's formal education, age, and work for pay outside the home. The findings underscore the importance of looking at ethnic social differentiation in the African context and advancing educational and employment opportunities for women.     

Conditional Fatherhood: Identity Theory and Parental Investment Theory as Alternative Sources of Explanation of Fathering

Two alternative theoretical models of parenting, identity theory and parental investment theory, are investigated as sources of explanation of men's fathering attitudes and behaviors. Four dimensions of fathering are explored: responsivity, harshness, behavioral engagement, and affective involvement. Concepts from identity theory operationalized as predictors include father role salience, role satisfaction, and reflected appraisals. From parental investment theory, concepts included investment maximization, contingent commitment, and paternity certitude. Using telephone survey data drawn from a community‐based probability sample of 208 fathers, each of the four individual indicators of fathering and a composite fathering measure were regressed against the theoretical predictors in hierarchical regression analyses. Both theoretical models were significant, with identity theory predictors accounting for a greater proportion of variance than the parental investment theory predictors. This study underlines the importance of social psychological variables to understanding variations in men's commitments to children.     

Paternity Leave‐Taking and Father Engagement

Evidence suggests that paternity leave‐taking is associated with higher levels of father involvement, but research has been limited in its focus on cross‐sectional analyses and indicators of father involvement used. This study uses national longitudinal data to examine whether paternity leave‐taking is associated with 2 indicators of father engagement when children are infants, whether paternity leave‐taking is associated with trajectories of father engagement during the first few years of a child's life, and whether the relationships between paternity leave and father engagement are explained by fathering commitments and attitudes. The results suggest that longer periods of leave are associated with more frequent engagement in developmental tasks and caretaking when children are infants as well as during the first few years of children's lives. There is also evidence that father attitudes partially explain the relationships between length of paternity leave and father engagement.     

Marriage and the economic status of women with children

Marriage is positively correlated with income, and women with children are much less likely to be in poverty if they are married. Selection into marriage makes it difficult to assess whether these correlations represent a causal effect of marriage. One instrument for marriage proposed in past research is the gender of a woman’s first child. We find that women who have a boy first are about 0.33 percentage points more likely to be married at any point in time. This effect operates through both increasing the probability that unmarried mothers marry the child’s father and reducing the probability of divorce. We also find that women whose first child is a boy experience higher levels of family income and are less likely to receive welfare income, be below the poverty line, and receive food stamps. Estimates using child gender as an instrumental variable for marriage suggest that marriage plays a large causal role in improving the economic well-being of women with children and that these effects are largest among women at the lower end of the income distribution.     

Anorexia nervosa in males: A case report and review of the literature

Only 5–10% of the diagnosed cases of anorexia nervosa occur in males. Anorexia nervosa can be difficult to identify in males because it may occur in a different subset of the population as compared to females and because anorectic males use different terms to express conflicts regarding body size and shape than their female counterparts. This case study illustrates how a young prepubescent male responded to traumatic events in his life by developing anorexia nervosa with an eventual loss of 33% of his premorbid weight. Precipitants of this patient's illness were his parent's divorce, his mother's remarriage, a precipitous relocation, his mother's pregnancy, and his sister's development of a life-threatening disease, all occurring during the early stages of puberty. The study concludes that anorexia nervosa in young males can result from multiple psychologically traumatic events which occur at a particular stage of development.     

Remembering the impossible possibility: Kierkegaard and human capital

Kierkegaard is classified as an existentialist. The irony of course is if he were authentically existential, then he would escape any categorisation. Rather than reading Kierkegaard as yet one more item on the shelves of the history of philosophy, why not read him as though he were relevant to our lives? Our argument is that modern capitalism has taken a subjective turn, and therefore reading Kierkegaard is as timely as ever. This isn’t a matter of constructing a politics out his texts but applying it to our lives. The modern subjective form of capital is human capital as was already diagnosed by Foucault in his prophetic lectures on bio-politics. At the heart of human capital is the ideology of the subject as a form of investment. We want to show how Kierkegaard’s own account of subjectivity resists this appropriation of the self by capital through a new ontology of subjectivity. At the heart of this ontology is a reversal of Aristotle. It is not the actual that determines the possible, but the possible the actual.     

Why do households rent while owning houses? Housing sub-tenure choice in South Korea

This study aims to analyze the effects of household characteristics on housing sub-tenure choice and understand the behavior of families who opt to rent while owning other homes in South Korea. Tenure status is subdivided according to the difference between consumption and investment demands for housing. It is found that that when families are faced with the choice of renting while owning another house, the probability that they will decide on this option increases up to the sixth income decile and then declines. Similarly, this probability increases until the tenant reaches age 50 and then decreases. Furthermore, the probability of a household choosing to rent while owning another home is greater if a member of the household is married with school-age children.     

Adolescent fathers involved with child protection: social workers speak

This study examined adolescent paternity through structured interviews with their social workers. It adds to the literature by exploring if there were young men involved with the child protection services (CPS) system who are fathers, identifying their unique needs, and beginning discussions on working with these young men. CPS social workers from six area offices and one juvenile detention facility completed surveys for each father on their caseload. A 3.5% rate of adolescent paternity was observed across these offices. Information about the nature of the young men's involvement with CPS, their involvement with their children, and their unique needs as fathers are provided. This paper also identifies some practice and policy implications for adolescent fathers and CPS charged with their care.     

It is not just escalation: The one dollar game revisited

This paper examines the one-dollar auction game ruling out escalation. The aim of the paper is to understand if players’ expectations about competitors’ moves are strong enough to induce at least one player to bid more than the auctioned euro. Any other bid represents an expected loss for the bidder, so he maximises his own payoff by choosing a bid, which produces a null expected payoff. The empirical results and the analysis based on them support theoretical findings. It is possible that the winner pays more than €1 to get €1 because of his expectations about competitors’ bids and because of his indifference over a certain interval. The results are symptoms of some risk aversion. In an English auction escalation leads to this result, but when escalation is ruled out, expectations and indifference of preferences can lead to the same result.     

Women,children and marriage in Swaziland

While sociologists have long theorized that marriage is an almost universal institution developed to create stable units for the rearing of children, data from interviews with 100 rural and 25 urban women in Swaziland in 1988-89 reveal that these assumptions reflect narrow ethnocentric views rather than the relationship between marriage and children which exists in Swaziland where there is a prevailing pattern of early childbearing and later marriage. Whereas half of all Swazi mothers aged 20-30 are unmarried, this proportion drops to a third by age 40 and to a fifth by age 50. It is popular to state that the reason that marriage is not a prerequisite for child-bearing is that a deterioration of morals has accompanied the erosion of traditional morals. However, a careful reading of early essays reveals that the practice is of long standing. In fact, not only is this a normal pattern in Swazi society, there are well understood rules for allocating the responsibility of children outside of marriage which are being strained by the spread of industrial capitalism. The customs which accompany premarital child-bearing include the father paying a compensation (5 cattle) to the mother's family for the birth, the father having the right to "buy" the child, and the traditional right of the king to forbid marriage to warriors. This system of premarital conception has resulted in a very high birthrate and has been fostered by the homestead system with its kinship networks and shared resources. A growing ambivalence to children can be seen in the fact that the marriage rituals which give a husband the right to his wife's sexuality rather than those which involve the paying of a price for the rights to the children are the most commonly performed. In addition, the old image of the natural father proudly asserting his rights to his children is rarely seen in modern Swaziland. The mother's family, from which the child can be claimed at any time up until puberty, tries to avoid investing heavily in a resource (the child) which may be snatched away. The fact that most mothers now assign the father's name to their children indicates their willingness to have the child appropriated. In the meantime, the women are expected to be the sole providers for their children.     

Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa,alias Olaudah Equiano,the African

Recent scholarship has raised doubts about whether or not abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, who was known in his own lifetime as Gustavus Vassa, was born in Africa. While baptismal and naval documents indicate that he was born in South Carolina, it is argued here that his autobiographical account is nonetheless accurate, although allowing for reflection and information that was learned later in life. Information on facial markings (ichi) and other cultural features that are recounted in Vassa's account indicate that he had first hand experience of his Igbo homeland and that he was about the age he thought he was at the time of his forced departure from the Bight of Biafra on a slave ship in 1754.     

Property,wealth, and social change: Piketty as a social science engineer

This paper applauds the vision and originality of Piketty's Capital and Ideology. We draw attention to the distinctive methodological perspective which he adopts, which we liken to call “social science engineering.” This allows a problem oriented perspective on long‐term global social change which sidesteps siloed disciplinary debates in social science and history about the meaning of modernity, the rise of capitalism, the formation of social groups, and the primacy of nations. We bring out how his theory of property permits him to take forward his overarching insight that economic growth leads to wealth accumulation. This, therefore, challenges long standing sociological perspectives by insisting that modernity is a conservative, rather than a revolutionary and transformative process. We build on this essential contribution by noting some areas where his work can push forward even further, notably that his focus on shifting relativities obscures qualitative historical changes, and more particularly means his analysis of the 20th century is not as provocative as that of the 19th century.     

Will the possibility of divorce discourage marriage-specific investment?

Becker et al. (1977) argue that the possibility of divorce discourages the accumulation of marriage-specific capital. Their argument has been confirmed by empirical studies that assume labor supply and marriage-specific investment are negatively related. We argue that since it is possible for individuals to increase marriage-specific investment without changing labor supply simultaneously, the conventional approach using the change in labor supply to infer to the change in marriage-specific investment may lead to a biased conclusion. This paper incorporates dynamic and stochastic optimal control approach into a material-spiritual goods framework. The model disentangles marriage-specific investment form other marital effort, and demonstrates that only part of effort devoted to marriage is marriage-specific investment and only the individuals who have spiritual and emotional needs make marriage-specific investment. Marriage-specific investment is highest in marriages where individuals behave altruistically, lower in marriages where individuals behave selfishly, and zero in marriages where spiritual goods are not valued. The model also implies a result that is contrary to conventional wisdom: the possibility of divorce does not always discourage, and may even encourage, marriage-specific investment. Since the impact of the divorce risk on marriage-specific investment depends on three factors: time preference, the level of the risk and the correlation between the divorce risk and marriage-specific capital, it could be optimal for an individual to invest more under uncertainty than in the corresponding risk-free world if he or she can well understand and predict his or her partner's spiritual needs. The key factor in the decision process is the confidence in predicting the partner's spiritual needs.     

New variable-population paradoxes for resource allocation

We identify previously unnoticed ways in which agents can strategically distort allocation rules, by affecting the set of “active” agents. (i) An agent withdraws with his endowment. (ii) He gives control of his endowment to someone else and withdraws. (iii) He invites someone in and let him use some of his endowment. (iv) He pre-delivers to some other agent the net trade that the rule would assign to that second agent if that second agent had participated. In (i) and (ii), he and his co-conspirator may end up controlling resources that allow them to reach higher welfare levels than they otherwise would. In (iii) and (iv), he may end up with a bundle that he prefers to the one he would have been assigned had he not engaged in the manipulation. We show that (i) the Walrasian rule is not “withdrawing-proof”, nor “endowments-merging-proof, nor “endowments-splitting-proof”, but that it is “pre-delivery-proof”, and that (ii) canonical selections from the egalitarian-equivalence-in-trades solutions satisfy none of the properties.     

Mutual agreement,subliminal persuasion,and the possibility of pluralism

This article concludes the correspondence between Michael Warren Tumolo and myself about the roles of philosophy and rhetoric in each other’s business. It builds upon his original article “A Sublimed Experience of the Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic,” my response to this, and then his response “On Critical Faith and Metacritical Agnosticism: Nietzsche, Socrates, and the Searches for Knowledge.” Tumolo begins with a discussion of Plato’s method in his Republic and his use of deceitful rhetoric in the Metals Myth at the same time as he is devaluing rhetoricians for being deceitful. My response concerns his selective and literal versus my holistic and contextual readings of Plato and the complexities of reading a dramatic dialogue. His response illuminated the orientation for his method in the antiepistemologist stance he shares with several colleagues and the metacritical or pluralist stance he claims to share with Nietzsche. My conclusion examines the difficulties of maintaining a pluralist position when certain of one’s argument. Tumolo’s antiepistemological and pro-rhetoric polemic belies his advocacy of pluralism. I find Nietzsche to be compatible with a dramatic and dialogical Plato and suggest that Tumolo’s method would be stronger if inspired by this Plato rather than fighting against him.