From smiling to smirking? 3D printing,upgrading and the restructuring of global value chains

3D printing (3DP) has been heralded as a revolutionary technology that can alter the way production is organized across time and space – with important redistributive effects on geography and size of production activities. In this article, we examine the impacts that a widespread adoption of 3DP could have on restructuring, upgrading and distributing value added along manufacturing global value chains (GVC) – with brief examples from the aerospace and automotive industries. We highlight two possible scenarios for GVCs – a complementarity scenario of 3DP and traditional manufacturing overlapping, which would reproduce power relations in GVCs and the current distribution of value added in a ‘smiling curve’; and a substitution scenario of 3DP partly or fully superseding traditional manufacturing, which would have more transformational effects in terms of ‘rebundling’ activities, regionalizing or localizing GVCs, and flattening the smiling curve into a ‘smirk’.     

Rank and response: A field experiment on peer information and water use behavior

Perception of peer rank, or how we perform relative to our peers, can be a powerful motivator. While research exists on the effect of social information on decision making, there is less work on how ranked comparisons with our peers influence our behavior. This paper outlines a field experiment conducted with 3896 households in Castro Valley, California, which uses household mailers with various forms of social information and peer rank messaging to motivate water conservation. The experiment tests the effect of a visible peer rank on water use, and how the competitive framing of rank information influences behavioral response. The results show that households with relatively low or high water use in the pre-treatment period responded differently to how rank information was framed. I find that a neutrally-framed peer rank caused a small “boomerang effect” (i.e., an increase in average water use) for low water use households, but this effect was eliminated by competitive framing. At the same time, a competitively-framed peer rank demotivated high water use households, increasing their average water use over the full period of the experiment. This result is supported by evidence that the competitive frame on rank information increased water use for households who ranked “last” in the peer group – a detrimental “last place effect” from competitively-framed rankings.     

Rent-seeking and competitive preferences

In this experiment, I examine the extent to which competitive social preferences can explain over-bidding in rent-seeking contests. The Human treatment is a standard two-player contest. In the Robot treatment, a single player bids against a computerized player, eliminating potential social preference motives. The results show no difference in bids between treatments at the aggregate level. Further analysis shows evidence of heterogeneous treatment effects between impulsive and reflective subjects. Moreover, impulsive subjects are more likely than reflective subjects to deviate qualitatively from the shape of the theoretical best response function.     

Influencing behaviour: The mindspace way

The ability to influence behaviour is central to many of the key policy challenges in areas such as health, finance and climate change. The usual route to behaviour change in economics and psychology has been to attempt to ‘change minds’ by influencing the way people think through information and incentives. There is, however, increasing evidence to suggest that ‘changing contexts’ by influencing the environments within which people act (in largely automatic ways) can have important effects on behaviour. We present a mnemonic, MINDSPACE, which gathers up the nine most robust effects that influence our behaviour in mostly automatic (rather than deliberate) ways. This framework is being used by policymakers as an accessible summary of the academic literature. To motivate further research and academic scrutiny, we provide some evidence of the effects in action and highlight some of the significant gaps in our knowledge.     

Sex, self-interest and health care priorities

In this questionnaire study, individuals were asked to prioritise publicly provided preventive health care services, one of which would be unavailable to them by virtue of their sex. The aim was to establish whether men and women would exhibit different degrees of self-interest when making a constrained choice. Around 1800 subjects from east-central England prioritised three different types of cancer screening. Most also provided written explanations for their rankings and these were classified into explanatory themes. Logistic regressions using socio-demographic and attitude data predicted the type of screening chosen as first priority. The analysis revealed that many men and women did indeed assign similar priorities to the different types of screening and, even when the priorities differed, these were often justified by similar arguments relating to technical aspects of the interventions and to self-interest. However, women were far more likely than men to prioritise a type of screening from which they themselves would benefit directly and the variations in preferences and explanations between the sexes occurred primarily because of differences in other-regarding attitudes. The bias towards screening of females was driven by women's greater worries about the disease in question and by men's “benevolent sexism” with respect to women's wellbeing.     

The relationship between conflict events and commodity prices in Sudan

Though recent literature uncovers linkages between commodity prices and conflict, the causal direction of the relationship remains ambiguous. We attempt to contribute to this strand of research by studying the dynamic relationship of commodity prices and the onsets of conflict events in Sudan. Using monthly data ranging from January 2001 through December 2012, we identify a structural breakpoint in the multivariate time series model of prices of the three staple foods (sorghum, millet, and wheat) and conflict measure (number of conflict events) in September of 2011. Applying structural vector autoregression (SVAR) and linear non-Gaussian acyclic model (LiNGAM), we find that wheat price fluctuation is a root cause of conflict events in Sudan. We recommend several policy and programmatic suggestions structured toward production, subsidy, price regulation and support for rural farmers and consumers to stabilize commodity prices.     

Replication: Cheating,loss aversion,and moral attitudes in Vietnam

We use the coin-flip paradigm and a short survey about moral attitudes under three conditions to answer three questions: (i) Do people cheat more when financial incentives are present in comparison with no incentives? (ii) Do they find it more difficult to maintain their ethical standards when they have been given a small amount of money? and (iii) Do moral attitudes predict cheating behavior? Using a sample of Vietnamese college students, we discover that a financial incentive does not matter until people feel that they are facing a loss. In addition, we do not find any evidence that moral attitudes could predict the unethical behavior in our sample. Our findings shed further light on cheating behaviors and loss aversion through an experimental investigation.     

Childhood exposure to the Second World War and financial risk taking in adult life

Adverse childhood experiences might have long-lasting effects on decisions under uncertainty in adult life. Merging the European Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement with data on conflict events during the Second World War, and relying on region-by-cohort variation in war exposure, we show that warfare exposure during childhood is associated with lower financial risk taking in later life. Individuals who experienced war episodes as children hold less – and are less likely to hold – stocks, but are more likely to hold life insurance, compared to non-exposed individuals. Effects are robust to the inclusion of potential mediating factors, and are tested for nonlinearity and heterogeneity. Moreover, we provide evidence of hedonic adaptation to war, as high and low intensity of war exposure have comparable long-term effects. We also document that war exposure in childhood increases sensitivity to financial uncertainty since exposed-to-war individuals are less likely to hold stocks after periods of high volatility. Finally, we shed light on the most likely mechanism in the relationship between war exposure and financial risk taking – i.e., enhanced sensitivity to uncertainty – and we show that preferences, and not beliefs, channel this relationship.     

Separating psychological momentum from strategic momentum: Evidence from men’s professional tennis

In dynamic contests, strategic momentum and psychological momentum potentially coexist, which makes it difficult to distinguish between the two. We employ the setting of professional tennis, which allows us to separate psychological from strategic momentum. In tennis, converting a break point potentially triggers both strategic momentum—due to a change in the relative position of the players—and psychological momentum—due to a change in the perception of the players. To distinguish between these two momentum types, we employ exogenously given interruptions. Interruptions are predicted to affect psychological momentum negatively, while leaving strategic momentum unaffected. Using 4930 game-by-game observations from 141 Grand Slam men’s single matches, we show that the breaking players’ probability of winning a game increases after converting a break point, which provides evidence for momentum. Moreover, we show that this momentum effect is negatively affected by an interruption. Thus, psychological momentum seems to be the main trigger leading to a performance increase after a converted break point.     

The moderating effects of home region orientation on R&D investment and international SME performance: Lessons from Korea

Drawing from the resource-based view, we investigate how firm and country combinations affect international SME performance. Using a sample of 2676 international Korean SMEs, we explore the relationships among SME R&D investment, home region orientation and financial performance. Results show that R&D investment has a horizontally inverted S-shaped relationship with performance reflecting cost leadership, stuck in the middle, and differentiation strategies. We also find that a home region orientation moderates the relationship between R&D investment and performance. Home region orientation positively moderates the relationship when R&D investment reflects cost leadership or differentiation but negatively moderates a stuck in the middle strategy.