News

Heike Hennig-Schmid analyzed the effect of a random audit including fines on individuals' honesty by means of a novel controlled behavioral experiment framed in a neonatal care context. He found evidence that individual characteristics (gender, medical background, integrity) are related to dishonest behavior. 

Andrea Matozzi introduced a model of turnout where social norms, strategically chosen by competing political parties, determine voters' turnout. Social norms must be enforced through costly peer monitoring and punishment. When the cost of enforcement of social norms is low, the larger party is always advantaged.

On Wednesday, September 19 the all-Russian seminar "Mathematical methods of decision analysis in economics, finance and politics" was held. A. Karpov gave a lecture on "On the Number of Separable Preference Profiles".

Anand E. Sokhey presented multifaceted approach to the relationship between religion and gun control, drawing upon the integration of Christian nationalist views, partisanship, and clergy messaging.

Jan Fidrmuc studied the impact of physical attractiveness of on productivity. He utilize a context where there is no or limited face-to-face interaction, academic publishing, so that scope for beauty-based discrimination should be limited. Using data on around 2,000 authors of journal publications in economics, he found a significantly positive effect of authors’ attractiveness on both journal quality and citations. 

Anastasia Burkovskaya introduced a model of electoral choice that allows for derivation of joint distribution of turnout and voter share from unobservable joint distribution of costs of voting and preferences over candidates. Under a set of mild assumptions, she showed non-parametric identification of joint distribution of costs of voting and preferences over candidates from observable data on single elections/referendum.

Konstantin Sonin used a global game approach to analyze a situation, in which the incumbent leader trades off the possibility of protest against him and the possibility of protests aimed to restore his power if he is dismissed in a coup. Thus, media freedom serves as an ex ante protection for such a dictator.

On Wednesday, June 20 the all-Russian seminar "Mathematical methods of decision analysis in economics, finance and politics" was held. G. Penikas gave a lecture on "Modelling Fraud Operations within Agent-Based Model of Russian Banking System"

Ethan Bueno de Mesquita studied deterrence in a world where attacks cannot be perfectly attributed to attackers. In his model, each of n attackers may attack the defender. The defender observes an imperfect signal that probabilistically attributes the attack. The defender may retaliate against one or more attackers, and wants to retaliate against the guilty attacker only. He uncover an endogenous strategic complementarity among the attackers: if one attacker becomes more aggressive, that attacker becomes more “suspect” and the other attackers become less suspect, which leads the other attackers to become more aggressive as well. 

Chris Berry explained the quantitative test of leader effects (RIFLE), that allows researchers to test a null hypothesis of no leader effect and also estimate the proportion of variation in an outcome variable attributable to leaders vs. other factors. To demonstrate the substantive value of RIFLE, he implemented it for world leaders, U.S. governors, and U.S. mayors and for several outcomes. This results improve understanding of where, when, and why leaders matter.