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Cooperation with incomplete monitoring
Caisl, Jakub ; Bauer, Michal (advisor) ; Červinka, Michal (referee)
We approach the topic of provision of public goods in an experimental economic study using the Public Goods Game setting. We allow subjects to punish each other but vary the structure and amount of information they can base their decisions upon. We try to add to the current literature on reciprocity and study whether people are willing to punish under such incomplete information. Since punishment under uncertain conditions can be quite destructive in terms of welfare, this closely relates to whether people are able to provide public good themselves or whether they need some external assistance. In terms of public policy, this can add to the debate on when should government provide certain services and when it should be left to individuals. In terms of behaviour inside of an enterprise, our study could be well applied to problems that arise when teams work on a common project but some people free-ride on effort of others.
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Variability Among Determinants of Education Attainment: the Effect of Natural Resources and Institutional Quality in Sub-Sahar Africa
Hanspal, Tobin ; Bauer, Michal (advisor) ; Riegl, Martin (referee)
Master's Thesis: Tobin Hanspal May 18th, 2012 Variability Among Determinants of Education Attainment: The Effect of Natural Resources and Institutional Quality in Sub-Sahara Africa ABSTRACT: This thesis exploits survey data from 21 Sub-Saharan African countries. After constructing a dataset of over 100,000 households to analyze the variability in traditional determinants of schooling attainment across exogenous domains, results indicate strong heterogeneity across countries in the effects of household composition and parental background. Additionally, findings suggest that 1) marginal effects of parental education are on average three times smaller for secondary compared to primary school attainment, 2) countries with lower corruption are correlated with higher levels of educational mobility, 3) dependence on natural resource revenue is associated with increased educational mobility. And finally 4) household wealth becomes a stronger determinant in countries with better institutions. Exogenous factors appears to have a large correlative impact on schooling outcomes, such as individuals belonging to the richest households have almost ten times the chances of completing primary schooling over the poorest quintile in less corrupt states compared to only a marginal advantage in highly corrupt states.
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Household nutritional effects of the DICONSA food subsidy program
Dent, Felix ; Bauer, Michal (advisor) ; Janský, Petr (referee)
This thesis is an empirical research project assessing the household nutritional impact of the DICONSA food subsidy program in Mexico. By employing a combination of propensity score matching and OLS econometric approaches, I conduct an analysis of household survey data contained in La Encuesta Nacional de Ingresos y Gastos de los Hogares (ENIGH) from Mexico. I find strong evidence of a significant increase in household caloric intake in rural areas targeted by the program, driven primarily by increased consumption of DICONSA subsidised cereal products and corn grain in particular. I find no evidence of decreased caloric intake resulting from overriding income effects of subsidisation. However, my investigation into the specifics of participant household food expenditure data suggests that reselling of subsidised commodities may occur amongst poorer households.
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Do Information Cascades Arise Easier under Time Pressure? Experimantal Approach.
Cingl, Lubomír ; Bauer, Michal (advisor) ; Pertold, Filip (referee)
Information cascades as a form of rational herding help to explain real-life phenomena such as fads, fashion, creation of 'bubbles' in financial markets or conformity in general. In this paper I attempt to model propensity to herd and infer its relationship to time-pressure by conducting a laboratory experiment. I let subjects perform a simple cognitive task under different treatment conditions and levels of time pressure with the possibility to herd. The order of decision-making is endogenous and the task is not probabilistic. Rather, I impose uncertainty of private signal by different levels of time pressure. This is expected to make participants prone to imitate the behavior of others. Apart from that I examine the effect of reputation (also called endorsement effect) as an addition to the public pool of information, which is expected to increase the probability to herd. The main findings are that propensity to herd was not significantly influenced by different levels of time pressure. Information cascades arose, but never in a perfect form. Personality traits measured by the Big Five protocol contribute considerably to the explanation of the model, but their relationship is not straightforward. Heart-rate increased during performance of a task, but was not correlated to subjectively stated...
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The Mašín Myth. Ideologies in Czech Literature and Culture since the Second Half of the 20th century until the Present Day
Švéda, Josef ; Janoušek, Pavel (advisor) ; Bílek, Petr (referee) ; Bauer, Michal (referee)
This dissertation analyses narratives of the Mašín brothers and their father, Josef Mašín senior. The Mašín brothers established what they called 'a resistance group' against the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, which between 1951 and 1952 killed three people. The brothers, alongside the other member of the group, Milan Paumer, escaped from the country in 1953, heading for the Western sectors of Berlin. Despite more than 20,000 East German and Soviet troops hunting them, the group reached West Berlin safely. Later, the brothers went to the USA where they joined the U.S. army. The dissertation analyzes a whole range of discourses including newspaper articles, historical papers, books, detective stories, novels, memoirs and also one episode of the Czechoslovak television series, Třicet případů majora Zemana ('Major Zeman's Thirty Cases'), entitled Strach ('Fear'), from 1975. The dissertation is conceptually embedded in cultural studies and critical theory. Drawing on Roland Barthesʼs work on mythologies, Hayden Whiteʼs theory of history and Slavoj Žižekʼs theory of ideology, the dissertation considers the relationship of the Mašín brothersʼ narrative representations with respect to the dominant ideology of the time. The first chapter of the dissertation deals with narratives produced in Communist...
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Consumer credits in Czech Republic through the optics of behavioral economics : the impact of the form of presented information on the individual's decision making
Švejdová, Lenka ; Bauer, Michal (advisor) ; Ryska, Pavel (referee)
This study is inspired by behavioral economics, which reveals some of the biases in people's behavior and stresses the importance of the form of presented information. The aim of this study is to show the impact of the form of presented information on the individual's decision making in case of choosing consumer credit. We design hypothetical questionnaires each with one specific table introducing three different consumer credits. Each table provides participant with different form of contract conditions, which however always bear the same level of price and sanction information. Such price and sanction manipulations enable us to measure the participants' trade-off between the price of the credit and related potential sanction costs and how the preferences change if we add claryfing form of contract conditions. Empirical analysis reveals that if the conditions of the consumer credits are presented in more transparent way, it seams to be possible to nudge consumers towards safer credit without restricting the range of options. The effort of the study is therefore to show the importance of financial institutions providing borrowers with transparent and unambiguous credit contracts.
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Do information cascades arise easier under time pressure? : experimental approach
Cingl, Lubomír ; Bauer, Michal (advisor) ; Pertold, Filip (referee)
Information cascades as a form of rational herding help to explain real-life phenomena such as fads, fashion, creation of 'bubbles' in financial markets or conformity in general. In this thesis I model both the propensity to herd as well as the propensity to view public information that may lead to herding. I carry out a laboratory experiment where I let subjects perform a simple task under different treatment conditions with the possibility to herd. Researchers normally imposed the uncertainty about the private signal by providing a task probabilistic in its nature such as drawing balls of different color from an urn and the decision-making was sequential. I conduct an experiment where the order of decision-making is endogenous and a task that is not probabilistic, but I impose uncertainty of private signal by increasing time pressure. This is expected to make participants prone to imitate the behavior of others, even though the others will be exposed to the same conditions. The time-pressure is also expected to induce stress reaction, which I measure as a physiological proxy variable - the heart rate frequency. Participants after each task state the subjective level of stress they felt to be in. I compare these two indices of stress if they bring same results. I also account for personality differences by...
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Choice Judgment DIscrepancy and Inequality Aversion in Earnings: Evidence from the Republic of Moldova
Besliu, Corina ; Bauer, Michal (advisor) ; Štika, Pavel (referee)
Nowadays BE deals with many other issues besides loss aversion and the preference for fairness mentioned above. There are many works which examine such phenomena like the endowment effect, or the framing effect, the inequality aversion and the judgment choice discrepancy, the money illusion, or the mental accounting. This thesis will examine two of these topics: the discrepancy between choice and judgment and the inequality aversion. It will also try to prove that besides material payoffs there exist nonmaterial payoffs, which influence people's choices through their judgments and can be crucial in some situations, leading sometimes even to reversals in preferences.
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Microfinance : fighting poverty vs. sustainable banking
Tesař, Martin ; Streblov, Pavel (advisor) ; Bauer, Michal (referee)
The thesis deals with microfinance institutions and their ability to serve very poor clients even without a continuous inflow of subsidies from donors. After disclosing the specificities that distinguish the clientele of these organizations from the clients of commercial banks in the developed world, the analysis of selected institutions from South Asia, including the famous Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, is performed. Using the data gathered from their annual reports of these microfinance institutions, the individual dependence on subsides during one decade is evaluated. The final part of the thesis utilizes the similarities that appear in the individual examination and the econometric analysis of the data for the extraction of the key factors and strategies that can help to decrease the dependence of this sector on donor financial support. The analysis finds that higher depth of outreach of an organization to the very poor does not inevitably lead to lower level of self-sustainability. The way to profitability may reside in appropriate interest rate policy and mobilization of savings. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)
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Discrimination, information and cognitive effects : evidence from a field experiment in the Czech rental housing market
Bartoš, Vojtěch ; Princ, Michael (referee) ; Bauer, Michal (advisor)
Aim of this thesis is to shed light on discriminative behavior of landlords in the Czech rental housing market using our data from a double blind Internet field experiment. The experimental design allows us to study the processes of choice of the landlords deciding about inviting or not inviting a particular member of a minority group to a visit of the offered flat. We control for various characteristics that may influence the resulting outcome and we try to disentangle their effects. Mainly we control for the minority group effect, for the effect of education and several cognitive factors that, according to a rich socio-psychological and behavioral-economical literature, affect the decision making. We introduce an innovative tool that allows us to study landlord's behavior using a special online mouse tracking program based on widely used MouseLab. The thesis is a part of a comprehensive research studying discrimination of minorities and the role of information in the Czech rental housing market.
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