Browsing by Author "Kim, Grace"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    For Love of the Game: A Study of Tournament Theory and Intrinsic Motivation in Dota 2
    (2019-04-17) Yao, Shengjie
    This paper studies the effect of intrinsic motivation on the extrinsic incentives specified by tournament structure in tournament theory in the context of e-sports. It incorporates tournament theory and motivation crowding theory in the same framework, something that past literature have hinted towards but never formally done so. It also uses an e-sports dataset, a type of dataset that few academics in the past have dealt with, but one that offers many interesting potentials. Results weakly show that crowding-in occurs in e-sports, but the effects of tournament structure on performance are inconclusive in the context of this paper. Implications of this paper lie mainly in the possibility for future academics to utilise e-sports data for research.
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    Incentives to Quit in Men’s Professional Tennis: An Empirical Test of Tournament Theory
    (2018-04-18) Walker, William
    This paper studies the influence of incentives on quitting behaviors in professional men’s tennis tournaments and offers broader implications to pay structures in the labor market. Precedent literature established that prize incentives and skill heterogeneity can impact player effort exertion. Prize incentives include prize money and indirect financial rewards (ranking points). Players may also exert less effort when there is a significant difference in skill between the match favorite and the match underdog. Results warrant three important conclusions. First, prize incentives (particularly prize money) do influence a player’s likelihood of quitting. Results on skill heterogeneity are less conclusive, though being the “match favorite” could reduce the odds of quitting. Finally, match underdogs and “unseeded” players may be especially susceptible to the influence of prize incentives when considering whether to quit.
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    Social Capital and Financial Development after Economic Shocks: Evidence from Italy after the Financial Crisis of 2007-2009
    (2019-04-12) Lampert, Ethan; Rao, Sujay
    Like traditional forms of capital, social capital – an intangible measure of an individual’s social networks, trust in institutions, and participation in civic life – has implications for personal and financial behavior. Individuals from educated, well-established backgrounds with fruitful family ties may be more amenable to opening new lines of credit or investing in stock markets due to their trust in and connectedness with society. But what happens after a major economic shock, such as the financial crisis of 2008? Using Italy as a case study and panel data from the Survey of Household Income and Wealth, we find that social capital has significant effects on an individual’s credit card usage, informal borrowing, and choice to invest in securities.
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    The Impact of Medicare Nonpayment: a Quasi-Experimental Approach
    (2020-04-20) Kornkven, Audrey
    In October 2008, a provision of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 known as Medicare “Nonpayment” went into effect, eliminating reimbursement for the marginal costs of preventable hospital-acquired conditions in an effort to correct perverse incentives in hospitals and improve patient safety. This paper contributes to the existing debate surrounding Nonpayment’s efficacy by considering varying degrees of fiscal pressure among hospitals; potential impacts on healthcare utilization; and differences between Medicare and non-Medicare patient populations. It combines data on millions of hospital discharges in New York from 2006-2010 with hospital-, hospital referral region-, and county-level data to isolate the policy’s impact. Analysis exploits the quasi-experimental nature of Nonpayment via difference-in-differences with Mahalanobis matching and fuzzy regression discontinuity designs. In line with results from Lee et al. (2012), Schuller et al. (2013), and Vaz et al. (2015), this paper does not find evidence that Nonpayment reduced the likelihood that Medicare patients would develop a hospital-acquired condition, and concludes that the policy is not likely the success claimed by policymakers. Results also suggest that providers may select against unprofitable Medicare patients when possible, and are likely to vary in their responses to financial incentives. Specifically, private non-profit hospitals appear to have been most responsive to the policy. These findings have important implications for pay-for-performance initiatives in American healthcare.