UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item Essays on Information and Non-Bayesian Beliefs(2024) Liu, Zhenxun; Filiz-Ozbay, Emel; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I present a comprehensive discussion of a class of biases within the realm of probabilistic reasoning, namely confirmation bias (encompassing or closely related to commonly seen terms in the literature such as motivated reasoning and wishful thinking). The dissertation consists of three main chapters. In Chapter 1, I propose a new and improved belief updating model that can accommodate both motivated and unmotivated confirmation bias. The model improves upon existing models in its ability to explain data better, and its applicability to settings beyond binary-state spaces. I characterize the model with three intuitive axioms. In two extended applications, I show that the model establishes a link between confirmation bias and several well-known phenomena, such as the significance of first impressions, the polarization of beliefs, and the perseverance of inaccurate beliefs. In Chapter 2, I turn to the experimental elicitation of motivated and unmotivated confirmation bias. Previous experiments have provided evidence for motivated and unmotivated confirmation bias individually, but never discussed the possibility that the two can occur together in depth. This chapter presents one of the first experiments that examines both forms of confirmation bias together. Subjects were asked to update their beliefs regarding both politically contextualized questions and neutral questions. Subjects exhibited both motivated and unmotivated confirmation bias, but there was also significant heterogeneity among them. Notably, motivated confirmation bias is significantly stronger in later rounds of the experimental tasks, which may be correlated with the shorter response times in the later rounds. In Chapter 3, which is joint work with Emel Filiz-Ozbay, we discuss wishful thinking (motivated confirmation bias) within a major application. In a rational inattention setting where consumers acquire information on the good’s quality before making purchasing decisions, we examine the implications of the presence of consumers with wishful thinking. These biased consumers are unaware of their bias, and weigh any good news about the product quality more heavily than a Bayesian consumer. The firm, which aims to increase the volume of sales, can strategically constrain the accuracy of the information that consumers can acquire. We show that in the presence of biased consumers, a firm would find it profitable to constrain information acquisition unless the prior belief on the quality of the product is too low. We characterize the conditions under which the entry of a competitor firm can effectively alleviate this type of exploitation. Our findings shed light on the incentives of review platforms for bombarding wishful consumers with low quality product reviews and limit consumers’ ability to identify to reviews with informative contents.Item Biology Teachers' Perceptions of Satisfaction:The Mediating Effects of Workplace Conditions and Epistemological Beliefs(2014) Daniels, Elizabeth; Parham, Carol S; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)National policy discourses have placed biology at the heart of the Nation's goal to achieve a global knowledge-based economy. However, researchers are finding educational trends of increasing biology teacher shortfalls which may undermine the achievement of that goal (National Science Board [NSB], 2012). Indeed, researchers have found science teacher shortages have been inexorably tied to many U. S. educational and societal problems, such as the goal of maintaining global economic competitiveness with other nations (National Academy of Sciences [NAS], 2007). On the other hand, in addition to research findings of the large science teacher shortfalls, researchers have found biology teachers' perceptions of satisfaction have a high correlation with retention. As a result, it appears critical to maximize the needed retention of biology teachers by increasing teachers' perceived levels of job satisfaction. Over the years, educational researchers have investigated science teacher perceptions of satisfaction as discrete units of workplace conditions or ii epistemological views. Researchers have given little attention to the relationship between school workplace conditions and the epistemological belief system of biology teachers regarding their views on the nature of teaching and learning, which may contribute to high levels of perceived satisfaction and commitment to their schools. The purpose of this study is to examine the dynamic interactions between these factors to identify the positive and negative influences on biology teachers' perceptions of satisfaction, thusly impacting teachers' practice behaviors, motivation, and commitment to the profession. School systems share many features with large organizations; therefore the design of this study utilized prior research from industry on stress affecting employee perceptions of satisfaction in the workplace. From organizational literature, Kristof-Brown et al.'s (2005) organizational model of person to environmental fit is adapted to illustrate the interactive flow between teachers' personally held epistemic beliefs systems with extant school workplace conditions. A review of literature suggested there are four workplace conditions most salient to biology teachers' perceptions of satisfaction; administrative support, student discipline, collegiality, and accountability along with three predominant epistemological beliefs of realism, contextualism, and relativism which formed the basis of the study. For this qualitative case study a semi-structured interview developed by Luft and Roehrig (2007) is utilized. The Teacher Belief Interview (2007) questions are designed to capture the epistemological beliefs of biology teachers.Item Essays on Transatlantic Differences in Taxation, Redistribution and Provision of Public Goods(2013) Torul, Orhan; Drazen, Allan; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates differences between the U.S. and Europe in the levels of taxation, redistribution, provision of public goods, and perception of fairness in income inequality. The first chapter concentrates on the differences between the U.S. and Scandinavia in higher education, and asks how it is possible that the U.S. has considerably more unequal higher educational attainment, higher reliance on private education and lower taxes than Nordic Europe, given similar political institutions. To address this question, I develop a parsimonious overlapping generations model in which agents can choose between public and private education. I first show that for a given tax rate difference of 7 percent, the model can deliver the observed educational Transatlantic differences, without having to rely on cross-country differences in preferences, parameters or other unorthodox elements. Next, I show the model can provide insight into how either the U.S. or the Nordic tax regimes could receive political consent. My explanation is due to the fact that per-capita output and other macroeconomic variables are U-shaped in taxes, both in the model and in the cross-country data. The economic intuition behind this finding is that while at low tax rates an increase in taxes and public education provision dampen human capital accumulation due to marked drops in private education attainment, at high tax rates public education provision gets sufficiently large that a majority of the population prefers public over private education, and further increases in taxes boost public education attainment more than they reduce private one. The second chapter incorporates the Transatlantic differences in perceptions into the picture and asks how the fact that a majority of Europeans believe income differences are primarily due to luck while a majority of Americans attribute such differences to the role of effort and skill reconciles with Transatlantic macroeconomic differences. I extend the model from the first chapter to include two sources of individual income differences: an inborn competence shock which affects labor supply choice and education decisions, and a luck shock on income, which is orthogonal to decision rules and inborn abilities. I find that low taxes coupled with low public education provision, as in the U.S. case, induce a large impact of inborn competence on schooling and labor supply, which in turn implies that a large share of the U.S. income differences are due to skill, education and effort. By contrast, a combination of high taxes and high public education, as in Europe, minimizes total income inequality and differences due to effort and inborn competence, and magnifies the impact of luck on inequality, in accordance with the existing beliefs. I also show that the U-shaped behavior of macro variables and welfare gains in taxes, as documented in the first chapter, carries over to this model, thereby providing insight into the political sustainability of macroeconomic variables and perceptions.