CEOs play games cooperatively, and well
We study whether CEOs of private firms differ from other people with regard to their strategic decisions and beliefs about others’ strategy choices. Such differences are interesting since CEOs make decisions that are economically more relevant, because they affect not only their own utility or the well-being of household members, but the utility of many stakeholders inside and outside of the organization. They also play a central role in shaping values and norms in society. We expect differences between both groups, because CEOs are more experienced with strategic decision making than comparable people in other professional roles. Yet, due to the difficulties in recruiting this high-profile group for academic research, few studies have explored how CEOs make incentivized decisions in strategic games under strict controls and how their choices in such games differ from those made by others. Our study combines a stratified random sample of 200 CEOs of medium-sized firms with a carefully selected control group of 200 comparable people. All subjects participated in three incentivized games—Prisoner’s Dilemma, Chicken, Battle-of-the-Sexes. Beliefs were elicited for each game. We report substantial and robust differences in both behavior and beliefs between the CEOs and the control group. The most striking results are that CEOs do not best respond to beliefs; they cooperate more, play less hawkish and thereby earn much more than the control group.
Here is the paper, by Håkan J. Holm, Victor Nee, and Sonja Opper, via the excellent Rolf Degen.
The culture and polity that is Brazil
Pentecostalist Churches, like Macedo’s Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, which promise instant wealth, offer competing live prophecies and other supernatural theatre, and exorcise demons in public. The leading Brazilian polling organisation, Datafolha, estimated them at 30 per cent of the voting population this time around, and they have electoral discipline…
The evangelists are everywhere. In the prisons, in the favelas, among the black poor, but increasingly also appealing to the financially insecure middle classes. Over the last decade, defections from the Catholic population are estimated at 1 per cent per year, but this is arguably accelerating. Bolsonaro may not achieve much else, but he may well prove to be the first president of post-Catholic Brazil, with a new moral order perpetuated by a new television regime. The rest of Latin America is not far behind.
Such is life in Bolsonaro’s Brazil! Here is the full piece, a letter to the LRB by Christopher Lord, via Alexander Papazian.
The impact of the Trump trade war
We analyze the short-run impacts of the 2018 trade war on the U.S. economy. We estimate import demand and export supply elasticities using changes in U.S. and retaliatory war tariffs over time. Imports from targeted countries decline 31.5% within products, while targeted U.S. exports fall 9.5%. We find complete pass-through of U.S. tariffs to variety-level import prices, and compute the aggregate and regional impacts of the war in a general equilibrium framework that matches these elasticities. Annual losses from higher costs of imports are $68.8 billion (0.37% of GDP). After accounting for higher tariff revenue and gains to domestic producers from higher prices, the aggregate welfare loss is $6.4 billion (0.03% of GDP). U.S. tariffs favored sectors located in politically competitive counties, suggesting an ex ante rationale for the tariffs, but retaliatory tariffs offset the benefits to these counties. Tradeable-sector workers in heavily Republican counties are the most negatively affected by the trade war.
Here is the full paper, by Pablo D. Fajgelbaum, Pinelopi K. Goldberg, Patrick J. Kennedy, and Amit K. Khandelwal. Full pass-through, of course, means that monopoly in these markets is likely not such a big deal.
Sunday assorted links
A modest proposal
So let me offer this modest proposal: When a child receives government assistance, we should deduct the cost from his parents’ future Social Security benefits. If one parent fails to provide child support, we should deduct the cost from his Social Security benefits alone; otherwise, the parents split the cost. Administratively, this seems quite manageable. Of course, this modest proposal means that many deadbeat dads will have to endure late retirement, but that seems a lot fairer than burdening taxpayers.
That is from Bryan Caplan.
Differences in the Quran treatment of the themes from the Book of Genesis
1. There are more angels.
2. Satan plays a larger role.
3. There is virtually no literary suspense.
4. Adam is not made in God’s image.
5. There is considerably less complexity of narrative perspective.
6. Allah does not speak directly, rather it is all coming from Allah.
7. Noah is more of a prophet of doom, and Abraham (“the first Muslim”) is a more important figure.
8. The Abraham story is more central.
9. Isaac is aware that he is slated for sacrifice, and accepts his fate. (That he is not killed of course you can think of as an “alternative” to the Christ story, namely that the blessed do not have to undergo a brutal, ugly death.)
10. The covenant with God is not national or regional in its origins.
For those points I drew upon my interpretations of Jack Miles, God in the Qu’ran, among other sources.
The polity that is Oregon
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown signed into law a first-in-the-nation rent control bill Thursday and called on the Legislature to turn its attention to funding new housing initiatives.
Because of an emergency clause, Senate Bill 608′s rent control and eviction protections go into effect immediately.
The details are somewhat less bad than that may sound at first:
The law caps annual rent increases to 7 percent plus inflation throughout the state, which amounts to a limit of just over 10 percent this year. Annual increases in the Consumer Price Index, a measure of inflation, for Western states has ranged from just under 1 percent to 3.6 percent over the past five years.
The rent increase restrictions exempt new construction for 15 years, and landlords may raise rent without any cap if renters leave of their own accord. Subsidized rent also is exempt.
Here is the full story, via Mike Tamada.
My Rubin Report interview
Saturday assorted links
1. The old blogosphere vs. current social media. (He should have blogged it, however.)
2. The Singapore chewing gum ban.
3. Training teachers how to shoot.
4. Hidden insults in an on-line Taiwanese game?
5. The golden age of the piano is now.
6. Ethiopia’s coffee ritual is being exported to China and Japan.
Injectable NanoParticles Let Mice See Near InfraRed!
Wow! This paper, Mammalian Near-Infrared Image Vision through Injectable and Self-Powered Retinal Nanoantenna, newly published in Cell seems like something from the future. Basically they injected nano-particles that convert near infra-red to visible light into the retinal layer of the eye in mice enabling the mice to see in the near infra-red.
…we developed ocular injectable photoreceptor-binding upconversion nanoparticles (pbUCNPs). These nanoparticles anchored on retinal photoreceptors as miniature NIR light transducers to create NIR light image vision with negligible side effects. Based on single-photoreceptor recordings, electroretinograms, cortical recordings, and visual behavioral tests, we demonstrated that mice with these nanoantennae could not only perceive NIR light, but also see NIR light patterns. Excitingly, the injected mice were also able to differentiate sophisticated NIR shape patterns. Moreover, the NIR light pattern vision was ambient-daylight compatible and existed in parallel with native daylight vision. This new method will provide unmatched opportunities for a wide variety of emerging bio-integrated nanodevice designs and applications.
…In summary, these nanoparticles not only provide the potential for close integration within the human body to extend the visual spectrum, but also open new opportunities to explore a wide variety of animal vision-related behaviors. Furthermore, they exhibit considerable potential with respect to the development of bio-integrated nanodevices in civilian encryption, security, military operations, and human-machine interfaces, which require NIR light image detection that goes beyond the normal functions of mammals, including human beings. Moreover, in addition to visual ability enhancement, this nanodevice can serve as an integrated and light-controlled system in medicine, which could be useful in the repair of visual function as well as in drug delivery for ocular diseases.
The researchers are mostly from China. It sometimes seems that Chinese researchers are naturally extropian, bolder and more optimistic about technology, human extension and the future than anyone else in the world.
Hat tip: Paul Kedrosky.
If you fear NIMBY, should you favor more immigration?
Many of today’s capitalists also want more immigration. Ocasio-Cortez also supports more immigration, which is confusing. According to Ricardo’s economic theory, expanding the population in the current environment will increase the cost of housing, health care, and higher education, just as it increased the price of wheat in the 19th century. This would hurt workers.
That is from Ronald W. Dworkin, “The New Rentiers: Ricardo Redux,” in the March/April 2019 issue of The American Interest, not yet on-line.
In general, facing up to the policy implications of a strict NIMBY world is something few wish to do. For instance, it seems to me that increases in the minimum wage, even if they initially went along Card-Krueger lines, would end up being passed along as greater benefits to landlords. All sorts of other attempts at amelioration could backfire as well.
Or do we live in some kind of intermediate NIMBY world on the coasts, where you get to complain about the land restrictions, but don’t have to live with the policy implications of strict NIMBY? Maybe so! But if so, I would like to see this argued for at more length.
The Mormon asymptote?
…compared to some other religions, Mormonism is not doing too badly. Mormonism’s US growth rate of .75 percent in 2017 — kept in positive territory by still-higher-than-average fertility among Mormons — is actually somewhat enviable when compared to, for example, the once-thriving Southern Baptists, who have bled out more than a million members in the last ten years. Mormonism is not yet declining in membership, but it has entered a period of decelerated growth. In terms of congregational expansion, the LDS Church in the United States added only sixty-five new congregations in 2016, for an increase of half a percentage point. In 2017, the church created 184 new wards and branches in the United States, but 184 units also closed, resulting in no net gain at all.
By some estimates (p.7), only about 30 percent of young single Mormons in the United States go to church regularly. The idea of the Mormon mission, however, is rising in import:
More than half of Mormon Millennials have served a full-time mission (55 percent), which is clearly the highest proportion of any generation; among GenXers, 40 percent served, and in the Boomer/Silent generation, it was 28 percent.
In contrast, “returning to the temple on behalf of the deceased” is falling (p.54).
Mormons are about a third more likely to be married than the general U.S. population, 66 to 48 percent. But note that 23 percent of Mormon Millennials admit to having a tattoo, against a recommended rate of zero (p.162).
And ex-Mormon snowflakes seem to be proliferating. For GenX, the single biggest reason giving for leaving the church was “Stopped believing there was one church”. For Millennials, it is (sadly) “Felt judged or misunderstood.”
That is all from the new and excellent Jana Riess, The Next Mormons: How Millennials are Changing the LDS Church.
Oxford University Press also sent me a copy of J. Brian O’Roark Why Superman Doesn’t Take Over the World: What Superheroes Can Tell us About Economics, which I have not yet read.
Hayek auction markets in everything
Friedrich Hayek’s personal copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, complete with pencilled annotations by the champion of free market economics, is to go on sale as part of a trove of personal items being sold by Hayek’s family. Hayek’s typewriter, writing desk, photo albums, passports, a speech signed by former prime minister Margaret Thatcher and a set of cufflinks given to him by ex-US president Ronald Reagan are among the items set to go under the hammer in an online sale at Sotheby’s later this month.
That is from James Pickford at the FT, the Smith copy is estimated to go for £3,000 to £5,000, plus buyer’s premium of course.
Friday assorted links
1. Negotiating with North Korea.
2. A tree with its own zip code.
3. The Straussian theory of employee feedback within corporations. I don’t quite agree, but interesting nonetheless.
4. MIE: where does fake movie money come from?
5. Is your data worth anything?
6. TikTok now at one billion downloads.
7. “At 42, Bickert is currently one of only a handful of people, along with her counterparts at Google, with real power to dictate free-speech norms for the entire world.” Oops, correct link for #7 is here.
What are hologram-based concerts really like?
The technology behind these posthumous encores is complex; the truth is that holograms as many imagine them – exact 3-D digital replicas of humans, constructed from video footage – do not exist. Instead, as Martin Tudor of Base Hologram explains of their own process, “We start with a body double who works closely with our director to choreograph the performances and then we take the results of that and go to work on it digitally.” So while Mitch Winehouse insists that the tour will be a chance for audiences to see the “real” her, what they’ll actually be presented with is footage of a lookalike actress with a CGI 3-D mask on. Unlike Winehouse, who appeared to dislike touring, this digital spectre will be controlled and compliant. Recordings of the voice may belong to the original singer, but the physicality of the performance will be wholly manufactured.