Economic Threshold Analysis of Supplementing Dairy Cow Diets with Betaine and Fat during a Heat Challenge: A Pre- and Post-Experimental Comparison

Ex ante economic analysis can be used to establish the production threshold for a proposed experimental diet to be as profitable as the control treatment. This study reports (1) a pre-experimental economic analysis to estimate the milk production thresholds for an experiment where dietary supplements were fed to dairy cows experiencing a heat challenge, and (2) comparison of these thresholds to the milk production results of the subsequent animal experiment. The pre-experimental thresholds equated to a 1% increase in milk production for the betaine supplement, 9% increase for the fat supplement, and 11% increase for fat and betaine in combination, to achieve the same contribution to farm profit as the control diet. For the post-experimental comparison, previously modelled climate predictions were used to extrapolate the milk production results from the animal experiment over the annual hot-weather period for the dairying region in northern Victoria, Australia. Supplementing diets with fat or betaine had the potential to produce enough extra milk to exceed the production thresholds, making either supplement a profitable alternative to feeding the control diet during the hot-weather period. Feeding fat and betaine in combination failed to result in the extra milk required to justify the additional cost when compared to the control diet.

An Experimental Economic Study of Loss Aversion in Stock Trading Decisions

The disposition effect is a form of behavioral bias that tends to result in investors holding on to their losing stocks for too long and selling winning stocks too soon. It can be explained by the behavioral economics theory of loss aversion. Even though many have studied this kind of behavioral bias in a variety of different countries, none of them have investigated the disposition effect in the case of Thailand. Therefore, the main objective of our study is to test the disposition effect among Thais by applying the experimental economic approaches of Weber & Camerer (1998) and Odean (1998) whilst also including the findings from questionnaires and interviews. We set up a simulation stock trading market to test the disposition effect of participants regardless of whether they had stock trading experienced or not. Subjects were required to trade among six stocks in 14 trading periods. We also added three more periods to test how different types of news impacted the subjects’ trading decisions. In addition, we analyzed socioeconomic factors that affect disposition effect behavior by using an econometric binary choice model. We found that this experiment can exhibit the disposition effect of subjects in terms of overall and individual measurement. In normal stock trading situations, we found that over 70% of subjects showed clear signs of the disposition effect, which seemed to decrease after they received fictional news.

An experimental look at trust, bargaining, and public goods in fishing communities

Pro-social behavior is crucial to the sustainable governance of common-pool resources such as fisheries. Here, we investigate how key socioeconomic characteristics influence fishers’ pro-social and bargaining behavior in three types of experimental economic games (public goods, trust, and trade) conducted in fishing associations in Chile. Our games revealed high levels of cooperation in the public goods game, a high degree of trust, and that sellers rather than buyers had more bargaining power, yet these results were strongly influenced by participants’ socioeconomic characteristics. Specifically, gender, having a secondary income source, age, and being the main income provider for the household all had a relationship to multiple game outcomes. Our results highlight that engagement in pro-social behaviors such as trust and cooperation can be influenced by people’s socioeconomic context.

Meta-Analysis of Seven Standard Experimental Paradigms Comparing Student to Non-student

This study embarked on the very challenging proposition of systematically organizing and classifying an assortment of experimental economics essays pertinent to seven experiments performed with both non-student and student populations. The experiments were the Dictator game, Stag Hunt – Coordination game, Risk Aversion Measurement (as measured by the players type of lottery choice), Trust game, Guessing game, Prudence Measurement, and the Guessing game. This meta-analysis reviewed 126 published and unpublished papers collected from several journals and papers provided by several authors via the Google Groups "Economic Science Association - Experimental Methods Discussion" group. Ultimately, only 39 studies were utilized due to methodological alignment. While some studies showed statistically significant differences between non-students and students as indicated by their respective 95% confidence intervals, the overall random-effects model of each of the seven games showed not to be statistically significant. This study contributes to the literature in three important ways. First, the study generates a comprehensive inventory and review of experiments comparing student to non-student populations for the last four decades; second, the study points out a possible limitation when combining several studies of the same game, despite following similar protocols, suggesting that compounded contextual complexities might diminish aggregate effects of the individuals’ behavioral responses to the financial incentives, and third, the study indicates that generalizations from one experimental economic study, may not render a solid base for extending statistical extrapolations applicable to the total population since the aggregate effects do not indicate substantial differences.

Ulysses' Pact or Ulysses' Raft: Using Pre-Analysis Plans in Experimental and Non-Experimental Research

In recent years, pre-analysis plans have been adopted by economists in response to concerns raised about robustness and transparency in social science research. By pre-specifying an analysis plan, researchers bind themselves and thus avoid the temptation to data mine or $p$-hack. The application of pre-analysis plans has been most widely used for randomized evaluations, particularly in the field of development economics. The increased use of pre-analysis plans has raised competing concerns that detailed plans are overly restrictive and limit the type of inspiration that only comes from exploring the data. This paper considers these competing views of pre-analysis plans, examines the extent that pre-analysis plans have been used in research conducted by agricultural economists, and discusses the usefulness of pre-analysis plans for non-experimental economic research.

Production of economic statistics for tourist accommodation services of Belo Horizonte under the flexible geography approach

This paper aims to produce an experimental economic statistic for the tourist accommodation services for Belo Horizonte under a flexible geography perspective. The starting point is the definition of economic activities in the tourist accommodation concept. The methodology adopted is up-down divided into four steps including filtering processes to accompany the definition, discounts related to obtaining information only for the tourists and procedures for adjustments to the statistics always being compared to the official disclosures and respecting the sum of regions. This analysis revealed an erratic behaviour of the number of establishments in Belo Horizonte across the years and half of the workforce is concentrated in micro and small enterprises. The data from the perspective of the flexible geography allowed to verify where the almost R$ 86 million indicated by the value added of the tourist accommodations were located in 2015. Keywords: Economic Statistics. Economic Geography. Accommodation Services. Flexible Geography.

Economic and Sociological Accounts of Social Norms

Classifying accounts of institutionalized social norms that rely on individual rule-following as ‘sociological’ and accounts based on individual opportunity-seeking behavior as ‘economic’, the paper rejects purely economic accounts on theoretical grounds. Explaining the realworkings of institutionalized social norms and social order exclusively in terms of self-regarding opportunityseeking individual behavior is impossible. An integrated sociological approach to the so-called Hobbesian problem of social order that incorporates opportunityseeking along with rule-following behavior is necessary. Such an approach emerges on the horizon if economic methods are put to good sociological use on the basis of recent experimental economic findings on rule-following behavior.