College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item Corruption, Reform, and Revolution in Africa's Third Wave of Protest(2019) Lewis, Jacob Scott; McCauley, John F; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)What explains diverging calls for reform and revolution in Africa over the past ten years? African countries have made substantial strides toward actual democratic devel-opment, including a concerted effort to address corruption. As African democracies have strengthened, calls by citizens for anti-corruption reform have grown, highlighting the progress that is being made. Yet, in recent years, some anti-corruption movements have called instead for revolution - completely replacing the state or seceding altogether. What explains these calls for revolution? I argue that we need to understand how differ-ent types of corruption shape contentious goals. When corruption generates material benefits, citizens lose trust in politicians but do not lose trust in the system. In response, they call for reform, seeking to improve the system. When corruption generates system-ic benefits (distorting the system altogether), citizens lose trust in the institutions and instead call for revolution. I test this using individual-level data from survey experi-ments as well as large-n surveys, and group-level data using statistical analysis of pro-test events as well as case studies. I find strong support that types of corruption matter greatly in shaping contentious politics in Africa.Item Is It More Profitable to Post Prices? - Market Structure with Endogeneous Search Costs(2006-08-07) Gong, Binglin; Rust, John; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation contains three chapters. It analyzes a market where firms can choose whether or not to publicly post their prices. Price posting rewards a firm by reducing search costs for customers and thus attracting more demand, at the risk of triggering more direct price competition. In the first two chapters, I use a continuous model and a discrete model to discuss possible market equilibria, respectively. In a non-cooperative and dynamic environment, I find that when the supporting information technology becomes available to all firms, a firm wants to post prices only when it has appropriate cost advantage over its competitors. A lower cost of posting prices encourages firms to post their prices. Price posting improves market efficiency unless one firm has too much cost advantage. When a more efficient entrant replaces the incumbent price-posting firm, the incumbent wants to hide its prices again. These results explain why in some markets firms or individual traders hesitate to publicly post their prices and some even impose search costs on their prices. In the third chapter, I use a laboratory experiment to show how a market evolves when firms or individual traders endogenously determine the search costs on their prices. In the experiment, human subjects play sellers and the computer calculates demands and profits, assuming consumers behave optimally. I assign costs and demand parameters to subjects and let them choose both their prices and whether or not to publicly post them. I alter the production costs, the fixed cost of posting prices, and the possibility of communication among subjects across treatments to show the effect of these factors on market structure. Experimental results show that one is more likely to post prices when he or she has lower unit cost and when the fixed cost of posting prices becomes lower. Price posting lowers effective prices when communication among subjects is not allowed but raises prices when subjects can communicate with each other.