Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item BEYOND RISK: VOLUNTARY DISCLOSURE UNDER AMBIGUITY(2022) Rava, Ariel; Zur, Emanuel; Business and Management: Accounting & Information Assurance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In my dissertation, I examine the impact of ambiguity (Knightian uncertainty), alongside that of risk, on firms’ voluntary disclosure decisions. I confirm the well-known result that an increase in risk—uncertainty over outcomes—is associated with an increase in management guidance (earnings and capital expenditure forecasts). Conversely, I find that an increase in ambiguity—uncertainty over the probabilities of outcomes—is associated with less guidance. Furthermore, I show that ambiguity decreases following voluntary disclosures, consistent with managers being aware of and reacting to heightened ambiguity. Finally, I provide novel empirical evidence showing that guidance under ambiguity has adverse capital market consequences. Even though the ways through which risk impacts managers’ disclosure decisions have been extensively studied in the accounting literature, no extant research has examined whether and how ambiguity impacts these decisions. My findings are consistent with the notion that managers’ take into account the ambiguity in the environment, showing that ambiguity has an important and distinct impact on their voluntary disclosure decisions.Item FROM SOUND TO MEANING: QUANTIFYING CONTEXTUAL EFFECTS IN RESOLUTION OF L2 PHONOLEXICAL AMBIGUITY(2014) Lukianchenko, Anna; Gor, Kira; Second Language Acquisition and Application; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In order to comprehend speech, listeners have to combine low-level phonetic information about the incoming auditory signal with higher-order contextual information. Unlike native listeners, nonnative listeners perceive speech sounds through the prism of their native language, which sometimes results in perceptual ambiguity in their second language. Across four experiments, both behavioral and electrophysiological, this dissertation provides evidence that such perceptual ambiguity causes words to become temporarily indistinguishable. To comprehend meaning, nonnative listeners disambiguate words through accessing their semantic, syntactic and morphological characteristics. Syntactic and semantic cues produce a stronger context effect than morphological cues in both native and nonnative groups. Thus, although nonnative representations may differ in that they may lack phonological specification, the mechanisms associated with the use of higher-order contextual information for meaning resolution in auditory sentence comprehension are essentially the same in the native and nonnative languagesItem Essays in Behavioral and Experimental Economics(2006-05-18) Alevy, Jonathan Eliot; Chambers, Robert G.; List, John A .; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Behavioral economics aims to provide more realistic psychological foundations for economic models. Experimental methods can contribute to this effort by providing the ability to identify causal processes and motivations that can be confounded in field settings. The essays in this dissertation examine three critical issues in behavioral economics using lab and field experiments. The first two essays examine two core elements of economic rationality; expected utility theory and Bayesian updating. The essays consider, respectively, ambiguity, and information cascades, in environments in which limitations of the theories can be studied. The third essay examines a contracting game in which other-regarding preferences are explicitly considered. Decision making under ambiguity has been of interest to economists since the 1920's (Knight (1921), Keynes (1921)). It has received renewed attention due to the work of Ellsberg (1961). In the first essay I examine the stability of ambiguity attitudes using a within subject design across individual choice and market environments. The evidence favors stability, with attitudes elicited from individuals strongly correlated with trading decisions in asset markets. The comparative ignorance hypothesis of Fox and Tversky (1995) developed for individual choice is also supported in the market setting shedding light on the causes of ambiguity aversion. Previous empirical studies of information cascades have used either naturally occurring data or laboratory experiments. In the second essay attractive elements of each line of research are combined by observing market professionals from the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) in a controlled environment. Analysis of over 1500 decisions suggests that CBOT professionals behave differently than a student control group. Professionals are better able to discern the quality of public signals and their decisions are not affected by the domain of earnings. These results have important implications for market efficiency. The contracting game studies both one and two principal settings. With one principal, behavior is consistent with a reputational model in which principals are successful in structuring contracts to insure against defections by agents imitating inequity-averse behavior. The complexity of the two principal setting creates more difficulties, but there is evidence that reciprocity between principals partially mitigates the adverse payoff consequences.