scholarly journals Helping Friends or Influencing Foes: Electoral and Policy Effects of Campaign Finance Contributions

Author(s):  
Keith Schnakenberg ◽  
Ian R Turner

Campaign finance contributions may influence policy by affecting elections or influencing the choices of politicians once in office. To study the trade-offs between these two paths to influence, we use a game in which contributions may affect electoral outcomes and signal policy-relevant information to politicians. In the model, a campaign donor and two politicians each possess private information correlated with a policy-relevant state of the world. The donor may allocate his budget to either an ally candidate who has relatively similar preferences or a moderate candidate whose preferences are relatively divergent from the donor's preferred policy. Contributions that increase the likelihood of the moderate being elected can signal good news about the donor's preferred policy and influence the moderate's policy choice. However, when the electoral effect of contributions is too small to demand sufficiently high costs to deter imitation by groups with negative information, this informational effect breaks down.

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Hawkins ◽  
Noah D. Goodman

Asking questions is one of our most efficient and reliable means of learning about the world. Yet we do not often pose these questions to an impartial oracle; we ask cooperative social partners, in dialogue. In this paper, we aim to reconcile formal models of optimal question asking and answering with classic effects of social context. We begin from the observation that question-answer dialogue is motivated by a two-sided asymmetry in beliefs: questioners have a private goal but lack goal-relevant information about the world, and answerers have private information but lack knowledge about the questioner's goal. We formalize this problem in a computational framework and derive pragmatic questioner and answerer behavior from recursive social reasoning. Critically, we predict that pragmatic answerers go beyond the literal meaning of the question to be informative with respect to inferred goals, and that pragmatic questioners may therefore select questions to more unambiguously signal their goals. We evaluate our pragmatic models against asocial models in two ways. First, we present computational simulations accounting for three classic answerer effects in psycholinguistics. We then introduce the Hidden Goal paradigm for experimentally eliciting questioner and answerer behavior in scenarios where there is uncertainty about the questioner's goal. We report data from three experiments in this paradigm and show how our core computational framework can be composed with more sophisticated question semantics, hierarchical goal spaces, and a persistent state over which extended dialogue can unfold. We find that social inference is needed to account for critical aspects of the data.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirubanandam Grace Pavithra ◽  
Vasudevan Jaikumar ◽  
Ponnusamy Senthil Kumar ◽  
PanneerSelvam SundarRajan

Background: Many antibiotics were widely used as medication based on their distinctive features. Among them, sulphonamides were commonly used, however their recalcitrant nature makes them difficult to dispose. Hence, their interaction with environment and analytic technique requires considerable attention globally. Objective: Therefore, this review aimed to provide detailed discussion about environmental as well as human health behaviour and analytic techniques corresponding to sulphonamides. Methods: Various results and discussion were extracted from technical journals and books published by different researchers from all over the world. The cited bibliographic references were intentionally investigated in order to extract relevant information related to proposed work. Results: In this review, the determination techniques such as UV-spectroscopy, Enthalpimetry, Immunosensor, Chromatography, Chemiluminescence, Photoinduced fluorometric determination, Capillary electrophoresis for sulphonamide determination were discussed in detail. Among them, High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and UV-spectroscopy was effective and extensively used for screening sulphonamide. Conclusion: Knowing the quantification and behaviour of sulphonamide in aqueous solution is mandatory to opt the suitable wastewater treatment required. Hence, choosing appropriate high precision and feasible screening techniques is necessary, which can be attained with this review.


1953 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 406-416
Author(s):  
R. McL. Wilson

In the Gospel according to St. John it is written that ‘God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have ever-lasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.’ In these familiar words is summed up the message of the Bible as a whole, and of the New Testament in particular. In spite of all that may be said of sin and depravity, of judgment and the wrath of God, the last word is one not of doom but of salvation. The Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is a Gospel of salvation, of deliverance and redemption. The news that was carried into all the world by the early Church was the Good News of the grace and love of God, revealed and made known in Jesus Christ His Son. In the words of Paul, it is that ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself’.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 14
Author(s):  
Huiguan Ding ◽  
Asli Ogunc ◽  
Dale Funderburk ◽  
Shiyou Li ◽  
Zhebie Shi

For more than a decade, the People’s Republic of China has sought to expand the degree of internationalization of its official currency. In recent decades, China has become the world’s second largest economy, as well as the world’s largest trading nation, and its securities markets are among the largest in the world. Today, the RMB is among the top five as a world payments currency. One of the significant costs of achieving higher degrees of internationalization of a country’s currency is the complicating impact it has on the efficacy and effect of that country’s domestic monetary policy.  However, what is the nature and extent of that complicating impact? This paper employs an IS-LM model of an open economy as an analytical framework, embeds an RMB internationalization factor into that model. Specifically, with this model we examine the impact of RMB internationalization on the effects of China’s monetary policy. 


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Golman ◽  
George Loewenstein ◽  
Andras Molnar ◽  
Silvia Saccardo

Management scientists recognize that decision making depends on the information people have but lack a unified behavioral theory of the demand for (and avoidance of) information. Drawing on an existing theoretical framework in which utility depends on beliefs and the attention paid to them, we develop and test a theory of the demand for information encompassing instrumental considerations, curiosity, and desire to direct attention to beliefs one feels good about. We decompose an individual’s demand for information into the desire to refine beliefs, holding attention constant, and the desire to focus attention on anticipated beliefs, holding these beliefs constant. Because the utility of resolving uncertainty (i.e., refining beliefs) depends on the attention paid to it and more important or salient questions capture more attention, demand for information depends on the importance and salience of the question(s) it addresses. In addition, because getting new information focuses attention on one’s beliefs and people want to savor good news and ignore bad news, the desire to obtain or avoid information depends on the valence (i.e., goodness or badness) of anticipated beliefs. Five experiments (n = 2,361) test and find support for these hypotheses, looking at neutrally valenced as well as ego-relevant information. People are indeed more inclined to acquire information (a) when it feels more important, even if it cannot aid decision making (Experiments 1A and 2A); (b) when a question is more salient, manipulated through time lag (Experiments 1B and 2B); and (c) when anticipated beliefs have higher valence (Experiment 2C). This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis.


2015 ◽  
Vol 105 (12) ◽  
pp. 3766-3797 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Edmans ◽  
Itay Goldstein ◽  
Wei Jiang

We analyze strategic speculators’ incentives to trade on information in a model where firm value is endogenous to trading, due to feedback from the financial market to corporate decisions. Trading reveals private information to managers and improves their real decisions, enhancing fundamental value. This feedback effect has an asymmetric effect on trading behavior: it increases (reduces) the profitability of buying (selling) on good (bad) news. This gives rise to an endogenous limit to arbitrage, whereby investors may refrain from trading on negative information. Thus, bad news is incorporated more slowly into prices than good news, potentially leading to overinvestment. (JEL D83, G12, G14)


2006 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 128-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey P. Prestemon ◽  
Shushuai Zhu ◽  
James A. Turner ◽  
Joseph Buongiorno ◽  
Ruhong Li

Asian gypsy and nun moth introductions into the United States, possibly arriving on imported Siberian coniferous logs, threaten domestic forests and product markets and could have global market consequences. We simulate, using the Global Forest Products Model (a spatial equilibrium model of the world forest sector), the consequences under current policies of a widespread, successful pest invasion, and of plausible trading partner responses to the successful invasion. We find that trade liberalization would have a negligible effect on U.S. imports of Siberian logs and, consequently, on the risk of a pest invasion. But, if it happened, possibly through trade in other commodities, a successful and widespread pest invasion would have large effects on producers and consumers over the period 2002 to 2030.


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