College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/8
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
Browse
2 results
Search Results
Item IN THE NAME OF CULTURE: THE POLITICS OF CELEBRATION IN THE MULTICULTURAL CIVIL SPHERE(2018) Richer, Zach; Fisher, Dana R; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A common barrier to the civic integration of immigrant and minority groups is the suite of symbolic classifications that structure everyday relations in diverse societies and set standards for inclusion and exclusion in shared public spaces. Although the regulatory norms governing the civil sphere are increasingly understood to be constituent elements of social power, they are not frequently seen as targets of collective action. As they are held in private attitudes and expressed spontaneously in everyday conduct, these forms of symbolic power do not easily lend themselves to political solutions. What form might a contestation of symbolic exclusion take? This dissertation examines the strategy of celebratory civics pursued through an annual series of 23 free public cultural festivals organized throughout the year by ethnic community organizations in partnership with the city of Seattle. Participating groups ii describe the dominant civil sphere as a place where opportunities for public deliberation about ethnic minority issues are scarce and ineffective, while confrontational protests antagonize potential allies and produce negative associations with minority cultural groups. They are skeptical that traditional civic action targeting policymakers is adequate to addressing discriminatory practices where they are most intimately felt, in the everyday conduct of social life in diverse societies. Through positive emotional appeals directed towards unfamiliar audiences unlikely to engage with them in everyday life, festivals aim to establish “common ground” on which to displace ethnic and racial stereotypes and make viable alternative ways of affirming civic belonging. Based on interviews with ethnic community organizations, their municipal sponsors, and festival visitors, surveys demonstrating the audience profile and expectations for the event, and a year of ethnographic observation at planning meetings and public festivals, this dissertation explores the promise and limitations of a form of civic engagement that takes up positive emotions as both a tactic and the target of its efforts. I demonstrate that this style of collective action seeks to supply members of the dominant culture with the familiarity required not to see ethnic identity as a threat or a curiosity, such that ethnic minorities can feel comfortable conducting themselves in public spaces on other days of the year. This desire defines a multicultural civil sphere that cannot be secured through rights alone, but only through the erasure of symbolic boundaries preventing the viability of diverse cultural practices and different ways of asserting belonging in public space.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.