Predictors of Social Distancing and Mask-Wearing Behavior: Panel Survey in Seven U.S. States

This paper presents preliminary summary results from a longitudinal study of participants in seven U.S. states during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to standard socio-economic characteristics, we collect data on various economic preference parameters: time, risk, and social preferences, and risk perception biases. We pay special attention to predictors that are both important drivers of social distancing and are potentially malleable and susceptible to policy levers. We note three important findings: (1) demographic characteristics exert the largest influence on social distancing measures and mask-wearing, (2) we show that individual risk perception and cognitive biases exert a critical role in influencing the decision to adopt social distancing measures, (3) we identify important demographic groups that are most susceptible to changing their social distancing behaviors. These findings can help inform the design of policy interventions regarding targeting specific demographic groups, which can help reduce the transmission speed of the COVID-19 virus.

Productive Pacifists: The Rise of Production-Oriented States and Decline of Profit-Motivated Conquest

Scholarship suggests the profits from conquest have decreased over time. Given this, why were some states faster to abandon profit-motivated conquest, and why are some still seeking wealth from territorial control? We argue that land-rent dependence influences a regime's economic preference for territory. The more a state depends on rents extracted from land (i.e., the more land-oriented the economy), the greater its willingness to invest in securing control of territory. We develop a novel measure of land orientation, with 200 years of data, to evaluate the linkages between land orientation and military competition over territory. Across 160 regression models, we find robust evidence that land orientation predicts territorial competition. These results hold in both democracies and autocracies. The global reduction in land-oriented states offers a plausible explanation for the decline in the number of large-scale territorial conquests. Our findings also explain why some states retain strong economic motivations for conquest.

PENGARUH PREFERENSI AGAMIS DAN PREFERENSI EKONOMIS DALAM BERINVESTASI DEPOSITO SYARIAH DI KOTA MALANG

<p class="Abstract"><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p><em>Investment is the initial capital in a country's economic development.</em><em> Shariah bank in this case BRI Syariah is expected to be able to contribute to the growth of public investment in Indonesia through Sharia Deposits. There is a growing perception in the community that Islamic banks are the same as conventional banks, indicating that there are still many people who do not know about Islamic banking. This condition makes the level of public preference for Islamic banks is low. The level of preference can be determined by measuring the economic level and the profit value of each product or service. The purpose of this study is to look at the influence of religious preferences and economic preferences on investing in Islamic deposits in BRI Syariah Soekarno-Hatta Malang The population of this study is BRI Syariah KC Soekarno-Hatta Malang customers who have Sharia Deposit with 94 samples and the sampling technique uses purposive sampling. Data analysis techniques using SPSS 22 for windows program. The results of this study indicate that simultaneously the variables of Religious Preference and Economic Preference have a significant effect on the variable Investing in Islamic Deposits, while partially there is a significant effect between the variables of Religious Preference on Investing Islamic Deposits and partially there is a significant effect between the variables of Economic Preference on Investing Deposits Sharia.</em></p>

How Basic Cognition Influences Experience-Based Economic Valuation

The perception and integration of sequential numerical information is a common cognitive task. It is a prerequisite for experience-based economic choices, but it is usually not part of economic decision theory. To better understand the process of symbolic number integration and its influence on economic behavior, we performed three experimental studies that examined mean estimates and economic valuations of continuous number distributions. The results indicate that participants valued random number distributions below their respective arithmetic means and valued distributions as lower when their variance increased, indicating risk aversion. A similar though less pronounced pattern also occurred in the matched mean estimation task where accuracy was incentivized and preferences played no role. These patterns suggest that seemingly risk-averse preferences are partly due to cognitive biases when perceiving and estimating numbers. In addition, participants' apparent economic preference for right-skewed outcome distributions could be attributed mainly to estimation biases. We discuss the extent to which the results can be explained based on a compressed mental number line and different sample weighting models. Finally, a new model that can account for the qualitative data pattern and has stronger overweighting of lower than higher numbers as its core feature is developed. Together, our results indicate that basic cognitive processes in perceiving and integrating number sequences play a key role in understanding experience-based economic behavior.

INFERRING THE ECONOMIC PREFERENCE OF A RENTAL VEHICLE COMPANY BY MODELING ITS DE-FLEETING PROCESS

When a vehicle manufacturer designs a contract with a rental vehicle company, it is important for the OEM to properly understand the rental company’s economic preference. While it is usually not directly observable, the economic preference of the counter party can often be revealed indirectly through some observable market behavior. In such cases, econometric inference needs to be used. In this paper, we use the de-fleeting process of the rental vehicle company as the inferential apparatus. To this end, we first develop a model to describe the decision-making in the de-fleeting process for the rental vehicle company, based on the optimal stopping theory. We then outline an econometric procedure to estimate the model parameters. Finally, we use simulated data to illustrate how to deal with some of the technical issues that one might encounter when the procedure is applied to real data.