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Empirical essays on dynamic decision making
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dc.contributor.advisor | Costa-Gomes, Miguel | |
dc.contributor.author | Xu, Zhibo | |
dc.coverage.spatial | vii, 238 p. | en_US |
dc.date.accessioned | 2019-08-23T16:06:21Z | |
dc.date.available | 2019-08-23T16:06:21Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2019 | |
dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10023/18365 | |
dc.description.abstract | This thesis is a collection of empirical and experimental studies on dynamic decision making. Chapter 1 studies the non-linear incentive of academics in economics departments of the U.K. high education institutions based on the data throughout the last four RAEs/REFs (i.e., RAE1996, RAE2001, RAE2008, REF2014). The time-discontinuity features of the RAEs/REFs and the constraints on job moving result in academics facing non-linear incentives. The data shows that in a harsh working environment with a periodical decline of the UK economics study, academic economists respond to such incentives by postponing the publication of their high-quality outputs to the beginning of the next assessment period, as expected. Chapter 2 presents an experiment designed to study how people play a two-person two-stage dynamic game with incomplete information and uncertainty and to study the effect of different elicitation methods on equilibrium and level-k play. The experimental data shows that around half of the subjects are strategic thinkers and level-k thinking dominates in strategic thinking. Furthermore, the comparison between the direct-response and the strategy method reveals that the latter method has a negative effect on players’ strategic thinking. Chapter 3 is an experimental study of the intertemporal consumption and saving behaviour of agents who have a finite lifecycle in an endowment economy in the presence of two different time profiles of taxes. A series of farsighted models (i.e., rational expectation and adaptive learning) and myopic models are introduced to explain players’ saving behaviour in the presence of a tax decrease in the middle of their lifecycle. In this setting, the data analysis shows that most of the subjects’ behaviours are consistent with the suggestions of myopic models. | en_US |
dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
dc.publisher | University of St Andrews | |
dc.title | Empirical essays on dynamic decision making | en_US |
dc.type | Thesis | en_US |
dc.contributor.sponsor | University of Birmingham | en_US |
dc.contributor.sponsor | University of Oregon | en_US |
dc.contributor.sponsor | University of St Andrews | en_US |
dc.contributor.sponsor | British Academy | en_US |
dc.type.qualificationlevel | Doctoral | en_US |
dc.type.qualificationname | PhD Doctor of Philosophy | en_US |
dc.publisher.institution | The University of St Andrews | en_US |
dc.identifier.doi | https://doi.org/10.17630/10023-18365 |
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