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Economists, political philosophers, and others have often characterized social preferences regarding inequality by imagining a hypothetical choice of distributions behind "a veil of ignorance". Recent behavioral economics work has shown that subjects care about equality of outcomes, and are willing to sacrifice, in experimental contexts, some amount of personal gain in order to achieve greater equality. We review some of this literature and then conduct an experiment of our own, comparing subjects' choices in two risky situations, one being a choice for a purely individualized lottery for themselves, and the other a choice among possible distributions to members of a randomly selected group. We find that choosing in the group situation makes subjects significantly more risk averse than when choosing an individual lottery. This supports the hypothesis that an additional preference for equality exists alongside ordinary risk aversion, and that in a hypothetical "veil of ignorance" scenario, such preferences may make subjects significantly more averse to unequal distributions of rewards than can be explained by risk aversion alone.
ContributorsTheisen, Alexander Scott (Co-author) / McMullin, Caitlin (Co-author) / Li, Marilyn (Co-author) / DeSerpa, Allan (Thesis director) / Schlee, Edward (Committee member) / Baldwin, Marjorie (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Economics (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
This paper examines infrastructure spending in a model economy. Infrastructure is subdivided into two types: one that makes future production more efficient, and another that decreases the risk of devastation to the future economy. We call the first type base infrastructure, and the second type risk-reducing infrastructure. Our model assumes that a single representative individual makes all the decisions within a society and optimizes their own total utility over the present and future. We then calibrate an aggregate economic, two-period model to identify the optimal allocation of today’s output into consumption, base infrastructure, and risk-reducing infrastructure. This model finds that many governments can make substantive improvements to the happiness of their citizens by investing significantly more into risk-reducing infrastructure.
ContributorsFink, Justin (Co-author) / Fuller, John "Jack" (Co-author) / Prescott, Edward (Thesis director) / Millington, Matthew (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor, Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Long Distance Exchange in Pre-Hispanic Chaco Canyon and the Mimbres Valley, New Mexico: A Comparison
Description
This thesis is a study of long distance exchange by the people of Chaco Canyon and the Mimbres Valley, New Mexico. Chaco Canyon region lies within the northwestern corner of present day New Mexico. Chaco Canyon belongs to the broader ancestral Puebloan region of the U.S. Southwest. With its rise to prominence in the early 900s CE, Chaco Canyon was a major cultural center before European contact. Almost exactly south of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico lies the Mimbres region. Mimbres is a sub-classification within the broader Mogollon culture. Although both smaller in size and not quite as extensively studied as Chaco culture, the Mimbres region was important in its own right. Mimbres culture is considered to have it beginnings as a cohesive unit beginning around 825-850 CE with Three-Circle phase during the Late Pithouse period. Although Chaco Canyon and the Mimbres Valley are not thought to be well connected either through trade or culture, there is no denying that the contemporaneous dating of the occupations, and in particular their collapse at the same time, around 1130-1150 CE, speaks to the possibility of common forces working on both regions. The goal of this thesis is to see if the long-distance exchange of valued objects in both regions indicates parallel cultural responses between the two to distant external conditions, particularly in Mesoamerica. Does the growth and decline in procurement of these objects imply similar dynamics to the occupational histories of the two regions over time? The answers to these questions, which are compared to expectations based on distance to sources and the relative social power, may ultimately aid the understanding of a seemingly paradoxical interregional relationship and why two highly independent regions experienced simultaneous collapse. Separated by some 550 km, Chaco Canyon and the Mimbres region still have much to reveal about the nuances of their relationship with one other.
ContributorsSalazar, Katherine Lee (Author) / Nelson, Ben (Thesis director) / Peeples, Matthew (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / School of Human Evolution and Social Change (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
This report describes the technology, benefits, and deployment of autonomous vehicles and how they are expected to impact the insurance industry, specifically collision coverage policies. A pure premium trend analysis is done to come up with a realistic prediction of how the frequency and severity of vehicle collisions will change over time. Two additional scenarios are done to address the fact that there is still uncertainty surrounding the timing of the implementation of AVs. Lastly, the risks that come with AVs are discussed along with potential risk mitigation strategies.
ContributorsMullenmeister, Morgan (Author) / Zhou, Hongjuan (Thesis director) / Milovanovic, Jelena (Committee member) / Zicarelli, John (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor)
Created2022-12
DescriptionThis thesis explores the progress of autonomous vehicle technology, regulation, and deployment. It also studies how autonomous vehicles will affect auto insurance, in particular how liability coverage will change and how liability premiums for autonomous vehicles will be different from premiums for traditional vehicles.
ContributorsLaw, Madelyn (Author) / Zhou, Hongjuan (Thesis director) / Milovanovic, Jelena (Committee member) / Zicarelli, John (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor)
Created2022-12
Description
This project aspires to develop an AI capable of playing on a variety of maps in a Risk-like board game. While AI has been successfully applied to many other board games, such as Chess and Go, most research is confined to a single board and is inflexible to topological changes. Further, almost all of these games are played on a rectangular grid. Contrarily, this project develops an AI player, referred to as GG-net, to play the online strategy game Warzone, which is based on the classic board game Risk. Warzone is played on a wide variety of irregularly shaped maps. Prior research has struggled to create an effective AI for Risk-like games due to the immense branching factor. The most successful attempts tended to rely on manually restricting the set of actions the AI considered while also engineering useful features for the AI to consider. GG-net uses no human knowledge, but rather a genetic algorithm combined with a graph neural network. Together, these methods allow GG-net to perform competitively across a multitude of maps. GG-net outperformed the built-in rule-based AI by 413 Elo (representing an 80.7% chance of winning) and an approach based on AlphaZero using graph neural networks by 304 Elo (representing a 74.2% chance of winning). This same advantage holds across both seen and unseen maps. GG-net appears to be a strong opponent on both small and medium maps, however, on large maps with hundreds of territories, inefficiencies in GG-net become more significant and GG-net struggles against the rule-based approach. Overall, GG-net was able to successfully learn the game and generalize across maps of a similar size, albeit further work is required for GG-net to become more successful on large maps.
ContributorsBauer, Andrew (Author) / Yang, Yezhou (Thesis director) / Harrison, Blake (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor)
Created2022-05
Description
Jane Austen’s beloved naval brother, Charles Austen (1779–1852), had a significant impact on her literary career.We find probable traces of him in the male characters appearing in Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1818), and he is said to have offered naval vocabulary to help his sister revise the second edition of Mansfield Park (1816). In addition to his impact during Jane’s lifetime (1775–1817), Charles played a role in sustaining her posthumous celebrity, modest as it was at first. Two previously unpublished brief letters by him—and references to him in other correspondence—offer an opportunity to speculate about his role in supporting his late sister’s literary reputation.
ContributorsKnezevich, Ruth (Author) / Looser, Devoney (Author)
Created2015