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.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    International Externalities in Pandemic Influenza Mitigation
    (2011) Hutton, Stephen; Cropper, Maureen; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    A serious influenza pandemic could be devastating for the world. Ideally, such a pandemic could be contained, but this may be infeasible. One promising method for pandemic mitigation is to treat infectious individuals with antiviral pharmaceuticals. While most of the benefits from treatment accrue to the country in which treatment occurs, there are some positive spillovers: when one country treats more of its population this both reduces the attack rate in the other country and increases the marginal benefit from additional treatment in the other country. These externalities and complementarities may mean that self-interested rich countries should optimally pay for some AV treatment in poor countries. This dissertation demonstrates the presence of antiviral treatment externalities in simple epidemiological SIR models, and then in a descriptively realistic Global Epidemiological Model (GEM). This GEM simulates pandemic spread between cities through the international airline network, and between cities and rural areas through ground transport. Under the base case assumptions of moderate transmissibility of the flu, the distribution of antiviral stockpiles from rich countries to poor and lower middle income countries may indeed pay for itself: providing a stockpile equal to 1% of the population of poor countries will reduce cases in rich countries after 1 year by about 6.13 million cases at a cost of 4.62 doses per rich-country case avoided. Concentrating doses on the outbreak country is, however, even more cost-effective: in the base case it reduces the number of influenza cases by 4.76 million cases, at the cost of roughly 1.92 doses per case avoided. These results depend on the transmissibility of the flu strain, the efficacy of antivirals in reducing infection and on the proportion of infectious who can realistically be identified and treated.
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    Matching Issues: An auction with externalities and unraveling matching markets
    (2005-06-22) Ranger, Martin; Cramton, Peter; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation examines two problems that may arise in matching problems. The first two chapters deal with auctions for multiple units where bidders exhibit externalities. The third chapter links risk aversion and information to unraveling in labor markets. Auctions can lead to efficient allocations in a wide class of assignment problems. In the presence of externalities, however, efficiency may no longer be guaranteed. This dissertation shows that a modification of Ausubel & Milgrom (2002)'s generalized ascending price auction can be used to allocate multiple items to bidders in this case. Despite the presence of externalities, the resulting auction possesses an efficient Nash equilibrium in pure strategies leading to a core allocation. Furthermore, under certain restrictions on bidder valuations, truthful revelation of valuations is found to a dominant strategy. The auction is augmented to include explicitly the auctioneer's preferences over final outcomes. Externalities affecting non-participants can thus be accounted for straightforwardly. In Cournot game where capacity constraints are determined in an auction prior to the market interaction, the valuations for capacity in the auction will exhibit externalities. Using the generalized ascending price auction allows the bidding firms to reach a joint profit maximizing capacity allocation below the Cournot equilibrium level. Since this comes at the expense of consumer surplus the auctioneer may have an incentive to specify its own valuation taking into account total surplus maximization. Then, the final capacity allocation is bounded by the profit maximizing and the Cournot equilibrium level. Unraveling labor markets, that is periodic labor markets where appointments are made earlier and earlier often leading to a break-down of the market, have been linked to risk-averse workers attempting to reduce the variability of the outcome. In many cases, early contracts are used to fix a wage when the relative supply and demand of workers in the market and hence the division of surplus is uncertain. This chapter represents a different approach. Both workers and firms have preferences over matchings and uncertainty is introduced through the quality of workers. Risk averse workers or risk-loving firms are found to be necessary for early contracting. Further research strategies are suggested.