UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
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Item A MIXED METHODS STUDY OF MARYLAND’S MONETARY INCENTIVES TO IMPROVE CHILD CARE(2019) Lee, Erica Schmeckpeper; Reuter, Peter; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 2016, 1.37 million children received subsidies under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ $8.7 billion Child Care Development Fund, though care is often low-quality. One way a state can incentivize providers to offer higher quality care is by providing larger child care subsidies to higher quality providers through a tiered reimbursement system. This research used a sequential explanatory equal status mixed method design to answer the question, Does Maryland’s tiered reimbursement system incentivize child care providers to attain a rating on Maryland’s Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS) that results in a higher reimbursement rate? The first stage of research consisted of multilevel logistic regressions to determine the association between child care centers’ and family child care providers’ reliance on subsidy payments and whether the provider was rated highly enough on Maryland’s QRIS (called Maryland EXCELS) to receive an incentive payment. The regressions used administrative data from the Maryland State Department of Education and demographic data from the U.S. Census. The analyses included all providers in Maryland that received payments from Maryland’s Child Care Subsidy Program in January 2018. The second stage of research consisted of 14 interviews with child care center directors across five counties to understand how they made decisions about which EXCELS rating to attain, how tiered reimbursements factored into their decisions, and general experiences with EXCELS. Results from my quantitative research found that for both child care centers and family providers, a greater subsidy density (i.e., number of children receiving a child care subsidy divided by the provider’s licensed capacity) was associated with a greater likelihood of a provider being rated higher quality (level 3 or higher in EXCELS) and receiving a tiered child care payment. However, results of my qualitative research found that few center directors reported that EXCELS payments factored into their decision on what EXCELS level to reach and none of the centers were singularly motivated by the bonuses. Rather, directors reported being intrinsically motivated to improve EXCELS ratings or motivated by technical assistance providers. Challenges to improving EXCELS ratings included a lack of capacity and difficulty finding qualified staff.Item Essays on high-status fallacies(2012) Malter, Daniel; Goldfarb, Brent; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation comprises three essays. Each essay challenges some of the commonly held beliefs about and provides novel insights into the role of status in markets. In essay 1, I study the causal effect of producer status on the price premiums producers are able to charge for their products, the underlying cause for this premium, and producers' incentives to invest in quality under a fixed status hierarchy. In essays 2 and 3, I investigate on the organizational and individual level, respectively, how high-status affiliations affect an audience's evaluation of a social actor's identity. The contribution of these papers lies in highlighting reasons for, mechanisms through, and conditions under which high-status affiliations become a liability. Essay 1 addresses the recent debate about the causality, cause, and consequence of returns to status on the organizational level. I exploit the \textit{grand cru} classification of chateaux of the M\'{e}doc created in 1855 as an unambiguous and exogenous status signal. I study its effect on wine prices and the incentive to invest in quality over a period of time during which information about producer and product quality has become increasingly munificent. As for the causality of status effects, I find evidence for causal returns to organizational status, but these returns are substantially overestimated if quality and reputation are not accurately controlled on the product level. As for the cause of status effects, I find that uncertainty is not a necessary condition and the taste for high-status products is a sufficient condition for returns to organizational status. As for the consequence of status effects, I find that higher-status producers' greater incentives to invest in quality are insufficient to enforce a separating equilibrium in producers' quality choices. The study cautions that causality claims in the status literature hinge upon proper identification, that returns to status can have alternative root causes, and that status hierarchies need not enshrine the quality hierarchy among producers. In essay 2, I propose that an organization's growth potential may suffer if its identity is confounded with or eclipsed by the high-status organizations with which it collaborates and competes. I devise two network measures to capture the degree to which identities are confounded or eclipsed. The theory is then tested with data on U.S. venture capital firm syndication between 1995 and 2009. The more a VC firm's identity is confounded with the identities of co-syndicating high-status firms, the smaller is the likelihood that it is able to raise a new fund. Further, the likelihood that an eclipsed identity hurts a VC firm's chances to raise a new fund increases in the firm's status. These findings suggest that in status-based market competition an organization needs to justify its identity claim by distinguishing itself from the established elite. Essay 3 picks up on anecdotal evidence that some audiences discount actors with strong high-status affiliations. This contradicts the extant literature, which in its overwhelming majority finds that an actor's chance to find audience approval for his identity increases in the strength of his high-status affiliations. In this article, I develop a unifying theoretical framework that is able to reconcile such seemingly contradictory effects. I propose that the optimal strength of high-status affiliations depends on an audience's taste for uniqueness/conformity in identity and the audience's uncertainty about the actor. An experiment shows that taste and uncertainty have interdependent effects, suggests that the extant status literature rests on implicit assumptions about audience taste, and highlights two conditions under which strong high-status affiliations are detrimental. Studies of rank mobility in academia and in a fraternity provide corroborating evidence for one of these conditions. Conformity-seeking audiences penalize too strong high-status affiliations if their uncertainty about the actor is high. The implications for identity design and social structure are discussed.Item Systems-compatible Incentives(2010) Levin, David; Bhattacharjee, Samrat; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Originally, the Internet was a technological playground, a collaborative endeavor among researchers who shared the common goal of achieving communication. Self-interest used not to be a concern, but the motivations of the Internet's participants have broadened. Today, the Internet consists of millions of commercial entities and nearly 2 billion users, who often have conflicting goals. For example, while Facebook gives users the illusion of access control, users do not have the ability to control how the personal data they upload is shared or sold by Facebook. Even in BitTorrent, where all users seemingly have the same motivation of downloading a file as quickly as possible, users can subvert the protocol to download more quickly without giving their fair share. These examples demonstrate that protocols that are merely technologically proficient are not enough. Successful networked systems must account for potentially competing interests. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how to build systems that give users incentives to follow the systems' protocols. To achieve incentive-compatible systems, I apply mechanisms from game theory and auction theory to protocol design. This approach has been considered in prior literature, but unfortunately has resulted in few real, deployed systems with incentives to cooperate. I identify the primary challenge in applying mechanism design and game theory to large-scale systems: the goals and assumptions of economic mechanisms often do not match those of networked systems. For example, while auction theory may assume a centralized clearing house, there is no analog in a decentralized system seeking to avoid single points of failure or centralized policies. Similarly, game theory often assumes that each player is able to observe everyone else's actions, or at the very least know how many other players there are, but maintaining perfect system-wide information is impossible in most systems. In other words, not all incentive mechanisms are systems-compatible. The main contribution of this dissertation is the design, implementation, and evaluation of various systems-compatible incentive mechanisms and their application to a wide range of deployable systems. These systems include BitTorrent, which is used to distribute a large file to a large number of downloaders, PeerWise, which leverages user cooperation to achieve lower latencies in Internet routing, and Hoodnets, a new system I present that allows users to share their cellular data access to obtain greater bandwidth on their mobile devices. Each of these systems represents a different point in the design space of systems-compatible incentives. Taken together, along with their implementations and evaluations, these systems demonstrate that systems-compatibility is crucial in achieving practical incentives in real systems. I present design principles outlining how to achieve systems-compatible incentives, which may serve an even broader range of systems than considered herein. I conclude this dissertation with what I consider to be the most important open problems in aligning the competing interests of the Internet's participants.