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I have been asked to explore how James Buchanan’s work on public finance and constitutional political economy might have emerged out of themes present in Frank Knight’s oeuvre, especially his Risk Uncertainty, and Profit. Buchanan’s body of work has inspired the development of a style of political economy sometimes described as Virginia or Constitutional Political Economy to distinguish it from the Chicago Political Economy with which George Stigler is associated, and with Stigler and Buchanan both being students of Knight. While Buchanan, unlike Stigler, did not write his dissertation under Knight’s supervision, this is a minor distinction because Buchanan regarded Knight as his de facto supervisor even though Roy Blough was his de jure supervisor. The author explains how Knight’s scholarly oeuvre can in large measure be detected in Buchanan’s effort to fashion an alternative approach to public finance and to articulate the field of study now called constitutional political economy.

This study first replicates, then perturbs, the centipede game as implemented by McKelvey and Palfrey (1992). It is thus both a replication study and an original research study. We use controlled laboratory experiments, with computer interfaces for each treatment, anonymous round-robin matching among the subjects across rounds, multiple (10) rounds within each treatment, and incremental changes between adjacent treatments allowing for an assessment of effects at the margin of different game configurations. We find unraveling to the subgame perfect equilibrium somewhat faster than did McKelvey and Palfrey (1992), when using their exact design. Perturbations to that design show that setting non-taker payoffs to zero induces earlier unraveling, as does the use of higher stakes (as in Murphy, Rapoport, and Parco (2006), and Rapoport, Stein, Parco, and Nicholas (2003), respectively). Other, subsequent perturbations show: that there is at most a subtle effect associated with using a 10-second timer with a default move, relative to untimed active moves; and that clock format versus tree format has a minimal effect in common information, unchanging payoff-parameterization environments. We verify the robustness of some key past findings in real-time games. We also explore in a common information environment, the effect of design features previously used in independent private values settings; here we find new evidence that features which might modulate information acquisition and/or processing in an independent private values setting may not restrict behavior in a common information setting.

Previous studies showed mixed results as to the cause of myopic loss aversion (MLA). This paper reexamines the main driver of MLA, considering two factors from previous studies and an additional factor.

Experimentally investigate whether flexibility of investment, frequency of information feedback, or timing of decision cause MLA.

Timing of decision and flexibility of investment explain most differences in subject behavior. Frequency of information feedback makes only a marginal contribution.

The differences in subject behavior can be interpreted by a shift in their reference points depending on the difference in flexibility of investment, frequency of information feedback, or timing of decision.

We replicate and extend the social history treatment of the Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe (1995) investment game, to further document how the reporting of financial history influences how laboratory societies organize themselves over time. We replicate Berg et al. (1995) by conducting a No History and a Financial History session to determine whether a report summarizing the financial transactions of a previous experimental session will significantly reduce entropy in the amounts sent by Investors and returned by Stewards in the investment game, as Berg et al. (1995) found. We extend Berg et al. (1995) in two ways. First, we conduct a total of five sessions (one No History and four Financial History sessions). Second, we introduce Shannon’s (1948) measure of entropy from information theory to assess whether the introduction of financial transaction history reduces the amount of dispersion in the amounts invested and returned across generations of players. Results across sessions indicate that entropy declined in both the amounts sent by Investors and the percentage returned by Stewards, but these patterns are weaker and mixed compared to those in the Berg et al. (1995) study. Additional research is needed to test how initial conditions, path dependencies, actors’ strategic reasoning about others’ behavior, multiple sessions, and communication may mediate the impact of financial history. The study’s multiple successive Financial History sessions and entropy measure are new to the investment game literature.

Insurance frauds deeply affect insurance companies, policyholders, and the insurance industry as a whole. The cost of fraudulent damage affects the profitability of companies, and has negative effects on the society in terms of moral values. Increases in insurance costs can lead to increases in the premiums paid by policyholders, each family, and, ultimately, all of the insured. Recently, new legal regulations related to this issue have been performed in Turkey and higher institutions have been created. A regulation issued by the Under-secretariat of the Treasury, on June 1, 2011, defines insurance fraud as aggravated fraud. Insurance fraud in Turkey usually takes the form of intentional misrepresentations of facts to the insurance company to get the company to pay for something not actually covered by the policy. Studies examined the insurance industry in terms of the concept of financial crime, and inclusion of the concept of financial crime in insurance regulations was proposed since financial crimes have an important place in the current problems of the industry. In addition, it is seen that insurance frauds have changed over time as a result of studies.

This paper examines associations of mass media and information and communications technologies (ICTs) with inequality and poverty. It has been found that newspaper circulation has a robust negative association with inequality. Radios and TVs also have a negative association with poverty. ICT expenditures (as a percentage of GDP) have a negative association with poverty. An ICT index is constructed which also has a negative association with poverty. An instrumental variable analysis confirms the robust negative association between newspaper circulation and inequality.