Type composition, career concerns, and signaling efforts

A modified version of Spence??s signaling model is analyzed to explore the relationships among the type composition, career concerns, and signal effort levels chosen by agents. We show that an increase in the proportion of high-type agents does not change an agent??s effort levels monotonically. High signaling efforts are induced when the proportion of the high type is in the middle range. Moreover, when the proportion of the high type is small, career concerns increase the signaling effort levels and have a more positive influence on the effort level of a high-type agent. However, when the proportion of the high type is large, career concerns might instead decrease the effort levels.     

The Legal Basis of Delegation of Governmental Powers in a Changing Society

In modern states, the delegation of governmental powers is a common way of executing governmental authority. The delegation of administrative power is widespread under China’s positive law, but there are problems with inconsistencies in the scope of the delegation, conflicts between delegation under different laws, etc. These problems originate in the weakness of Chinese legal theory on the subject, and especially in the lack of a dynamic interpretation of the historical background to such delegation, the absence of any scientifically constructed theoretical model of delegation, and the lack of effective regulations on delegation in the positive law system. The modern rule of law calls for reconstruction of the legal basis of such delegation against the background of social change. This requires clarifying the determinacy of the agents holding power, the relative division of powers, the overlapping nature of the agents to whom the powers apply, and the social character of the disposition of powers. Determination of the value orientation of system construction for the delegation of governmental powers should be based on limited transfer of governmental powers and functions, should be driven by the removal of obstacles to the exercise of governmental powers, should adopt a strategy of streamlining the execution of governmental powers and should aim at effectively integrating governmental powers.     

Pretrial Bargaining in the Face of a Random Court Decision: Evidence from Laboratory Games

If negotiation over ownership of an asset is unsuccessful, agents go to court to determine possession. Experiments examine how the presence of a stochastic court decision affects pretrial bargaining behavior. Two players have private information over the value of an asset, owned by one player. If there is no acceptable trade price, a random court decision assigns ownership. The impact of a second stage court decision on bargaining outcomes and the efficiency of trades is measured. Courts reduce the total earnings of players and the frequency of efficient trades. Relative earnings and bargaining behavior depend on which agent proposes the trade price.     

Decentralizing Social Services in Israel

This paper describes an attempt by the Israeli government to decentralize social services. Special attention is focused on the initiation of this planned effort of a highly centralized state. First, the Israeli culture is analyzed in terms of the delegation of authority and empowerment of citizens. Second, the principles of this planned change are summarized and results of two evaluation studies are presented. Several possible causes for the lack of success in decentralizing social services are suggested, followed by comments on the future of decentralization of social services in Israel.     

Negotiation and Defeasible Decision Making

In economically meaningful interactions negotiations are particularly important because they allow agents to improve their information about the environment and even to change accordingly their own characteristics. In each step of a negotiation an agent has to emit a message. This message conveys information about her preferences and endowments. Given that the information she uses to decide which message to emit comes from beliefs generated in previous stages of the negotiation, she has to cope with the uncertainty associated with them. The assessment of the states of the world also evolves during the negotiation. In this paper we analyze the intertwined dynamics of beliefs and decision, in order to determine conditions on the agents that allow them to reach agreements. The framework for decision making we consider here is based on defeasible evaluation of possibilities: an argument for a choice defeats another one if it is based on a computation that better uses all the available information.     

Informational Asymmetries and Observational Learning in Search

As economics modeling moves from super rational decision makers to considering boundedly rational agents, some economic problems deserve a second look. This paper studies the effects of learning on the efficiency of search. Once learning is taken into account, the structure of information flow becomes important. In particular, I highlight the truncated information structure in the search problem. Agents stop searching once a sufficiently attractive price is found. Therefore, they observe the performance of shorter searches, but do not directly observe the performance of longer searches. I design and conduct an experiment to test the hypothesis that this asymmetric flow of information leads agents to search too little. I find strong evidence in its favor. This suggests that in the presence of learning, the provision of a more symmetric information structure will make search more efficient.JEL Classification: C91, D83     

Comparing behavior under risk and under ambiguity in a lifecycle experiment

Experiments on intertemporal consumption typically show that people have difficulties in optimally solving such problems. Previous studies have focused on contexts in which agents are faced with risky future incomes and have to plan over long horizons. We present an experiment comparing decision making under certainty, risk, and ambiguity, over a shorter lifecycle. Results show that behavior in the ambiguity treatment is markedly different than in the risk condition and it is characterized by a significant pattern of under-consumption.     

就业市场中间人行为分析:基于社会资本视角

本文基于中国综合社会调查数据（CGSS）对劳动力市场上中间人行为进行分析，具体考察影响其分享就业信息、提供就业帮助和最终成功匹配的因素。研究表明，就业信息的分享体现了社会资本的“运作效用论”而非“地位效用论”。社会地位和教育水平较高的中间人并不热衷于信息分享，而就业帮助体现了趋异性交往原则。中间人倾向于向教育水平低于自己的求职者提供实质性的就业帮助。此外，间接关系比单一的强关系或弱关系更能预测人情资源。教育水平较低和有迫切就业需求的劳动者对社会资本依赖较大。与女性相比，男性更依赖关系渠道。企业设立固定金额的推荐奖金可促进员工分享就业信息概率，但不影响成功匹配的概率。     

黑龙江省部分国有企业管理有效性分析

管理有效性是指剔出客观基础条件优劣的影响,真正反应由于主观有效努力而产生经济效益的行为特性。有效的努力能够改变实力,那么通过实力的变化也可以反映出行为主体的相对有效努力程度。确切地评价管理有效性本身就是对行为主体的一种激励,有助于调动行为主体的积极性,避免主观不努力客观找原因现象。     

A Test of the Principle of Optimality

This paper reports on an experimental test of the Principle of Optimality in dynamic decision problems. This Principle, which states that the decision-maker should always choose the optimal decision at each stage of the decision problem, conditional on behaving optimally thereafter, underlies many theories of optimal dynamic decision making, but is normally difficult to test empirically without knowledge of the decision-maker's preference function. In the experiment reported here we use a new experimental procedure to get round this difficulty, which also enables us to shed some light on the decision process that the decision-maker is using if he or she is not using the Principle of Optimality - which appears to be the case in our experiments.     

Consulting an Expert with Potentially Conflicting Preferences

We study a situation where a decision maker relies on the report of a self-interested and informed expert prior to decide whether to undertake a certain project. An important feature in this interaction is that, depending on the collected information, the two agents have potentially conflicting preferences. Information contained in the report is partially verifiable in the sense that the expert can suppress favorable information sustaining the project but he cannot exaggerate it. Our results show that this setting favors the agent which is the less eager to undertake the project in that he always succeeds to induce his most preferred action.      

Minimax,information and ultrapessimism

Discussing the foundations of the minimax principle, Savage (1954) argued that it is utterly untenable for statistics because it is ultrapessimistic when applied to negative income, but claimed that such objection is not relevant when the principle is applied to regret. In this paper I rebut the latter claim. I first present an example where ultrapessimism, as Savage understood it, applies to minimax regret but not to minimax negative income. Then, for a sequential decision problems with two terminal acts and a finite number of states of nature, I give necessary and sufficient conditions for a decision rule to be ultrapessimistic, and show that for every payoff table with at least three states, be it in regret form or not, there exist an experiment such that the minimax rule is ultrapessimistic. I conclude with some more general remarks on information and the value of experimentation for a minimax agent.     

A note on decisions under uncertainty: the impact of the choice of the welfare measure

The paper addresses the question, how policy decisions under uncertainty depend on the underlying welfare concept. We study three different welfare measures: The first is directly based on the ex ante (expected) utility of a representative consumer whereas the second relies on an ex ante and the third on an ex post valuation of policy changes compared to the status quo. We show that decisions based on these measures coincide if and only if risk-neutral expected utility maximization is applied. Differences between the decisions are analyzed for both, risk-averse expected utility maximization and the MaxiMin criterion. For risk-averse decision makers, differences between the first and the second concept arise if the absolute risk-aversion of the decision maker is not constant in income. For risk-aversion and the MaxiMin criterion, the effort levels to provide a public good based on an optimization of ex post utility changes exceed those based on the first or second concept. Implications for environmental policy decisions based on the concepts of abatement costs and benefits from abatement are discussed.     

Experimental evidence on case-based decision theory

This paper starts out from the proposition that case-based decision theory (CBDT) is an appropriate tool to explain human decision behavior in situations of structural ignorance. Although the developers of CBDT suggest its reality adequacy, CBDT has not yet been tested empirically very often, especially not in repetitive decision situations. Therefore, our main objective is to analyse the decision behavior of subjects in a repeated-choice experiment by comparing the explanation power of CBDT to reinforcement learning and to classical decision criteria under uncertainty namely maximin, maximax, and pessimism-optimism. Our findings substantiate a predominant significantly higher validity of CBDT compared to the classical criteria and to reinforcement learning. For this reason, the experimental results confirm the suggested reality adequacy of CBDT in repetitive decision situations of structural ignorance.     

Spatial externalities and risk in interdependent security games

Individuals regularly invest in self-protection to reduce the risk of an adverse event. The effectiveness of self-protection often depends on the actions of other economic agents and can be modeled as a stochastic coordination game with multiple Pareto-ranked equilibria. We use lab experiments to analyze tacit coordination in stochastic games with two kinds of interdependencies in payoffs: “non-spatial” in which every agent’s action has an impact on the risk faced by every other agent, and “spatial” in which agents only impact the risk faced by their immediate neighbors. We also compare behavior in the stochastic games to deterministic versions of the same games. We find that coordination on the payoff-dominant equilibrium is significantly easier in the deterministic games than in the stochastic games and that spatial interdependencies lead to greater levels of coordination in the deterministic game but not in the stochastic game. The difficulty with coordination observed in the stochastic games has important implications for many real-world examples of interdependent security and also illustrates the importance of not relying on data from deterministic experiments to analyze behavior in settings with risk.     

Preference reversals: Time and again

This paper sheds new light on the preference reversal phenomenon by analyzing decision times in the choice task. In a first experiment, we replicated the standard reversal pattern and found that choices associated with reversals take significantly longer than non-reversals, and non-reversal choices take longer whenever long-shot lotteries are selected. These results can be explained by a combination of noisy lottery evaluations (imprecise preferences) and an overpricing phenomenon associated with the compatibility hypothesis. The first cause explains the existence of reversals, while the second explains the predominance of a particular type thereof. A second experiment showed that the overpricing phenomenon can be shut down, greatly reducing reversals, by using ranking-based, ordinally-framed evaluation tasks. This experiment also disentangled the two determinants of reversals, because imprecise evaluations still deliver testable predictions on decision times even in the absence of the overpricing phenomenon. Strikingly, when unframed ranking tasks were used, decision times in the choice phase were greatly reduced, even though this phase was identical across treatments. This observation is consistent with psychological insights on conflicting decision processes.     

Ambiguity aversion in multi-armed bandit problems

In multi-armed bandit problems, information acquired from experimentation is valuable because it tells the agent whether to select a particular option again in the future. This article tests whether people undervalue this information because they are ambiguity averse, or have a distaste for uncertainty about the average quality of each alternative. It is shown that ambiguity averse agents have lower than optimal Gittins indexes, appearing to undervalue information from experimentation, but are willing to pay more than ambiguity neutral agents to learn the true mean of the payoff distribution, appearing to overvalue objectively given information. This prediction is tested with a laboratory experiment that elicits a Gittins index and a willingness to pay on six two-armed bandits. Consistent with the predictions of ambiguity aversion, the Gittins indexes are significantly lower than optimal and willingnesses to pay are significantly higher than optimal.     

States of nature and states of mind: a generalized theory of decision-making

Canonical economic agents act so as to maximize a single, representative, utility function. However, there is accumulating evidence that heterogeneity in thought processes may be an important determinant of individual behavior. This paper investigates the implications of a vector-valued generalization of the Expected Utility paradigm, which permits agents either to deliberate as per Homo economics, or to act impulsively. This generalized decision theory is applied to explain the crowding-out effect, irrational educational investment decisions, persistent social inequalities, the pervasive influence of non-cognitive ability on socio-economic outcomes, and the dynamic relationships between non-cognitive ability, cognitive ability, and behavioral biases. These results suggest that the generalized decision theory warrants further investigation.

     

政策执行与权力关系重构以S市2003年市级居委会直选政策的制订过程为个案

本文运用政策执行研究“自下而上模式”的一些有价值的观点与方法,以及组织决策分析的概念工具,根据个案调查取得的经验材料与文献资料,对S市2003年居委会直选政策的制订过程加以考察,得出如下结论：政策执行过程,既是一个连续不断的互动过程、一个行动者的决策过程,同时也是一个权力关系重构的过程;与科层组织中依职能分工和职位分层而产生的静态的、单向的权力关系完全不同,在政策执行过程中,行动者通过策略性互动重构的权力关系是动态的、多向的;居委会直选之所以能够在体制冲突的背景下得以实施,是政策执行过程中权力关系重构的结果。