Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
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
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Application of Behavioral Economic Theory to College Student Drinkers with and without ADHD: A Daily Diary Study(2022) Oddo, Lauren Elizabeth; Chronis-Tuscano, Andrea; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Aims: Young people with ADHD are vulnerable to the initiation and escalation of hazardous alcohol use in college, posing high direct and indirect costs to these individuals and society. Behavioral economic theory proposes key etiological and maintenance factors of hazardous alcohol use that have never been examined at the daily level in connection to ADHD: alcohol demand, substance-free enjoyment and activity engagement, and behavioral activation. Method: College student drinkers with (n=51) and without (n=50) ADHD completed 14 consecutive days of daily diaries (n=1,414). We conducted a series of multilevel path models to examine (1) the effect of ADHD on average daily alcohol demand, substance-free enjoyment and activity engagement, and behavioral activation; (2) the effect of average daily alcohol demand, substance-free enjoyment and activity engagement, and behavioral activation on alcohol use and alcohol-related negative consequences; and (3) the moderating effect of ADHD on these same-day associations. Results: On average, drinkers with ADHD experienced more daily alcohol-related negative consequences relative to non-ADHD drinkers. ADHD was also associated with less daily substance-free enjoyment and behavioral activation. Regardless of ADHD status, there were significant associations among each behavioral economic risk factor and alcohol use and alcohol-related negative consequences, though effects differed at the within and between person levels. There were no moderating effects of ADHD on these same-day associations. Conclusion: This is the first study to apply daily diary methodology to examine behavioral economic risk factors among drinkers with versus without ADHD. Results expose areas of daily impairment specific to drinkers with ADHD and meaningfully advance theoretical conceptualizations of ADHD and hazardous alcohol use. Future research identifying daily associations among environmental triggers and alcohol problems in an ecologically valid manner has tremendous potential to inform the development of adaptive interventions delivered to the right people at the right time.Item Essays on the Impact of Social Influence in Industrial Organization and Political Economy(2020) Dalmia, Prateik; Filiz-Ozbay, Emel; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation theoretically and experimentally investigates the impact of social pressures in markets and politics. In the first chapter, I provide a micro-foundation for persuasive advertising of conspicuous goods that can either be made more attractive by greater popularity ("conformist markets") or by greater exclusivity ("snobbish markets"). Consumers are endowed with a latent attribute measuring some aspect of their identity, and a social status implied by this attribute. Consumers wish to signal a high status, and the function of advertising is to render brands a signaling device by linking products with social identity. In a conformist market, I find that advertising increases demand elasticity, inducing firms to converge on low prices, and can be used by a first mover to deter entry and gain monopoly rents. In this setting, advertising creates a cutthroat environment in which only one product can survive. In a snobbish market, advertising reduces demand elasticity, dampens price competition and promotes firm entry. In this setting, advertising can act as a public good to firms, increasing all firms' prices and profits. Additionally, it can lead to asymmetric equilibria where a firm appealing to high status consumers advertises more heavily, capturing a greater market share and charging a higher price. In the second chapter, Emel-Filiz-Ozbay and I consider a moral hazard problem where workers decide how much effort to put into individual projects that can succeed or fail. In our setting, workers may receive feedback about a partner's outcome, and such pay comparisons might influence their effort. We perform a laboratory experiment and find that subjects who failed increase their effort the next round. Moreover, subjects who failed while their partner succeeded increase their effort more than those whose partner also failed -- consistent with an aversion to being behind. We find that this effect is more pronounced for female subjects than male subjects. In the third chapter, Allan Drazen, Erkut Ozbay and I study the potential tension between between intrinsic reciprocity and forward-looking, instrumental motives. We perform an experiment in a political economy context where incumbent officials may have two competing desires. The first is the intrinsic desire to reciprocate to the kind actions of past voters by investing in policies favorable to them; and the second is the selfish desire to be reelected by investing in policies favorable to future voters to signal policy preference congruence with the latter. Our key finding, both theoretically and experimentally, is that when future and past voters do not perfectly overlap, reelection motives may constrain the intrinsic reciprocity of an elected leader to the voters who put her in office, but do not eliminate it entirely.Item DEMAND FOR SAFER FOOD IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES(2016) Ordonez, Romina Valeria; Hoffmann, Vivian E; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)According to the WHO, in less developed countries approximately 2.2 million people—most of whom are children—die annually of food and waterborne diseases. In these economies, information on the safety attributes of food is usually not available and enforcement of food safety regulations is often weak, particularly within markets for locally consumed food. Still, food safety in the developing world has long been considered a secondary concern relative to food availability. The goal of this dissertation is to contribute to a deeper understanding of some of the constraints that surround demand for safer food along food supply chains in developing countries. Consumers’ demand for safe food can be thought of as an investment in preventive health, which has been shown to be extremely low in developing countries. Hence, this dissertation contributes to the economics literature that explores the impact of health-related information on preventive health behaviors in poor countries. This dissertation focuses on the role of food safety information in affecting people’s purchase behavior in a developing country setting. Because food safety is mostly a credence attribute that cannot be ascertained—or is too costly to ascertain—even after consumption, the provision of information has an important role to play in the reduction of information asymmetries inside the food chains. Among the several actors that are involved in food value chains, this dissertation focuses on small-scale informal intermediaries and consumers. The effect of information on these actors’ demand for safer food is assessed through the estimation of willingness to pay for food labeled as having safer characteristics, and through the analysis of the effect of different types of health-related information on the decision of whether or not to purchase food advertised as safer to eat. To achieve this, two field experiments using revealed preference methods were conducted in Kenya, where maize, the staple food, is frequently contaminated with aflatoxin, a naturally-occurring fungal toxin that is harmful to human health. A brief introductory chapter is followed by a comparison of the advancement of food safety policy and research in developed countries with the corresponding evolution in developing countries (Chapter 2). The framed field experiment described in Chapter 3 tests whether maize traders in informal markets are willing to pay more for higher quality and safer maize. 369 traders from different markets across Kenya participated in a second-price sealed-bid auction in which information on moisture content and aflatoxin contamination of maize auctioned was varied experimentally using labels. The results show that information on moisture content significantly affects traders’ willingness to pay and suggest the observability of moisture content is limited. Also, the effect of information does not appear to be driven by the possibility of selling drier maize to the formal sector, nor by the intention to keep the dryer maize for own family consumption. Further, the impact of providing traders with information on aflatoxin contamination is over twice as large as the effect of moisture content information. These results show that there is potential for strengthening the price-quality relationship within this context by increasing the availability of information on maize quality and safety. Chapter 4 presents the results of a field experiment conducted among customers of small retail shops in Nairobi and smaller urban centers in eastern Kenya. Packages of maize flour were tested for aflatoxin, labeled as safe to eat when they complied with the aflatoxin regulation, and offered for sale at a 20% premium above the price of untested maize. Information messages about the health consequences of aflatoxin exposure and about local contamination prevalence were randomly varied across customers as they entered the shops. The results show that the impact of health messaging on purchase of tested maize varies significantly depending both on the specific content of the message, and on the characteristics and prior beliefs of consumers. Information on the local prevalence of aflatoxin contamination, which exceeded the vast majority of customers’ contamination priors, had the strongest impact on demand. This study demonstrates that combining information on the prevalence of a risk with its health consequences is an effective approach for encouraging preventive health behavior.