UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item AWAKENING ACTIVISM: THE POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS(2018) Braun, Joseph; Reed, William L; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Individuals are an integral part of international human rights. While central to our leading theories of human rights change and to the efforts of human rights organizations in the real world, empirical scholarship has not systematically investigated how individuals choose to become advocates. Without the mobilization of individuals, human rights institutions and campaigns are deprived of the energy and material that fuel their success. In this dissertation, I closely evaluate the reasons why individuals choose to become engaged in human rights campaigns, what drives them to advocacy, and what this tells us about the relationship between political psychology and international human rights. In Chapter 1, I consider how incidental emotions influence individuals’ support for child hunger relief and refugee assistance, finding that negative emotions like disgust tend to amplify pre-existing views. In Chapter 2, I evaluate the effects of the negativity bias and loss-aversion bias on support for child hunger relief. I find that the combination of negative imagery and gains-focused messaging had a significant and positive effect on individuals’ support for both personal and government action to help feed and house the hungry. In Chapter 3, I discuss the important effects that political ideology had on the relationships I observed in Chapters 1 and 2. I illustrate how those on the political left and right responded in systematically different ways in each of the experiments, and note how these differences reveal the critical importance of targeted messaging with an emphasis on ideology. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of these dissertation findings as theoretically important and practically useful, with an emphasis on a focused and practically-oriented future research agenda.Item Essays in Behavioral and Experimental Economics(2015) Lopez Vargas, Kristian Miguel; Ozbay, Erkut; Filiz-Ozbay, Emel; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation consists of three essays on behavioral and experimental economics. In Chapter 1, I introduce an integrated model of risk attitudes and other-regarding preferences that extends the standard notion of inequity discount to lotteries. In this model, a decision maker perceives inequity partly by comparing the marginal risks she and others face. It predicts that fairness considerations will alter risk attitudes, in particular, a higher tolerance to positively correlated (fair) risks compared to negatively correlated (unfair) risks. It is also capable of explaining the behavior by which people help others probabilistically (known as ex ante fairness). Furthermore, in contrast with the existing view of ex ante fairness based on expected outcomes, my model does not imply that stronger ex ante fairness behavior is associated with less risk sensitivity. I study these predictions with evidence from an experiment. I find that subjects take more risks when outcomes are ex post fair compared to when they are ex post unfair. I confirm ex ante fairness behavior is a common choice pattern and document how, according to the model, it responds to its relative price. Finally, I reject the implication of existing models that stronger ex ante fairness behavior correlates with less risk sensitivity. Chapter 2 is a joint work with Professor Brit Grosskopf (University of Exeter, UK). People communicate in economic interactions either aiming to alter material outcomes or because they derive direct satisfaction from expressing. In our study, we focus on the latter, the non-instrumental motivates, and find that this less researched aspect of expression has important economic implications. In particular, we experimentally study ex-post verbal expression in a modified Power-to-Take game and document people's willingness to pay for this kind of expression possibility. Our experiment contributes to previous studies discussing the role of mood-emotional states. We find that purely expressive as well as reciprocal motives are both non-trivial components of the valuation for non-instrumental expression. We demonstrate that expression possibilities have important impacts on welfare beyond what our standard economic view predicts. In Chapter 3, Emel Filiz-Ozbay, Erkut Ozbay and I study multi-object auctions in the presence of post-auction trade opportunities among bidders who have either single- or multi-object demand. We focus on two formats: Vickrey auctions where package bidding is possible and simultaneous second-price auctions. We show that, under complementarities, the Vickrey format has an equilibrium where the objects are allocated efficiently at the auction stage whether resale markets are present or not. The simultaneous second-price, on the other hand, leads to inefficiency with or without resale possibility. Our experimental findings show that the possibility of resale in second-price auctions decreases the efficiency rate at the auction stage compared to the no resale case. However, after resale, the efficiency rate in second-price is as high as that of Vickrey auction without resale outcomes in the experiment. Preventing resale neither benefits nor hurts auction revenues in a second-price format. This last chapter has been recently published in Games and Economic Behavior, Volume 89, Pages 1-16, January 2015.Item Open Bid Auctions: A Theoretical and an Experimental Study(2008-02-21) ghosh, dipan; Cramton, peter; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)For centuries, auctions have been used as an efficient market mechanism for selling or procuring goods. Over time, auctions have evolved from its very basic price call-out form to the much more sophisticated simultaneous multi goods design, the bulk of this dramatic evolution taking place in the later part of the twentieth century. Even though the earliest use of auction dates back to around 500 B.C. in history, proper scientific research aiming at improving the effectiveness or expanding the scope of this versatile market mechanism started around the 1960's. The pioneering work of William Vickrey in 1961 opened the floodgates for mathematicians and economists alike, to study this fascinating market mechanism, and within a very short period of time, both the understanding of the mechanism and the scope of its application improved vastly. Over these years, a huge mass of theoretical and empirical research has produced results that introduce newer auction designs and characterize the existing ones. This has also allowed scope for continued research in the field of auctions, thriving for improvements and solutions to yet-to-be answered questions. The main goal of this study is to accomplish just that; present improvements that try to address issues that have not been addressed yet. The dissertation is structured as follows. The first chapter highlights the progress that has been made in the field of auctions and introduces the advancements made in the more recent field of auction experiments. This serves as an introduction to the other chapters and briefly outlines the important findings both in the traditional theoretical literature, the more recent operational research literature and the alternative experimental literature. The second chapter introduces a new auction model designed to tackle a specific problem encountered in multiple homogeneous goods auctions, which has not been dealt with satisfactorily thus far. The last chapter presents an extension of the existing auction experiment methodologies in an attempt to reveal possible weaknesses in earlier auction experiments and to improve our understanding of important differences between open and sealed-bid auction formats.