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Browsing by Subject "experiment"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Consumer Food Choices and the Value of Time
    (2018-12) Short, Gianna
    The foods we eat are a special class of commodities that we must physically consume and metabolize in order to live. Intuitively, people understand that time--or lack thereof--plays a role in their food choices. Yet, time is often left out of consumer food choices modeled in economics. This dissertation seeks to gain improved insight about food consumption decisions by exploring their temporal nature. Part I approaches food and time from a behavioral economics perspective through an experiment designed to estimate the temporal discount rate for food consumption. Parts II and III are an in-depth exploration of how to incorporate the opportunity cost of time into food demand systems. The first approach (Part II) incorporates leisure time as a good into a complete demand system to eliminate the opportunity cost bias and estimate the elasticity of substitution between food and leisure. The second approach (Part III) develops and tests two methods to correct for the opportunity cost of preparation time using food purchase data alone.
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    Effect of Temperature on Prestressed Concrete Bridge Girder Strand Stress during Fabrication
    (2015-10) Swenson, Tanner
    The Minnesota Department of Transportation has reported erection cambers of many prestressed concrete bridge girders that were much lower than anticipated. A previous University of Minnesota study (O’Neill and French, MN/RC 2012-16) attributed the discrepancies to inaccurate estimates of the concrete strength and stiffness at release and strand force loss due to temperature during fabrication. The objective of this study was to further investigate the effects of temperature on strand force and camber during precast, prestressed girder fabrication and to make recommendations for the design and fabrication processes to improve the release camber estimation, if necessary. A thermal effects analysis was developed based on four key steps in the girder fabrication process: tensioning, concrete-steel bond, release, and normalization. The study included fabricating six short prestressed concrete segments released at early ages to determine the time/temperature associated with bonding the prestressing strand to the concrete. To investigate the non-recoverable prestress losses during girder fabrication, four sets of girders (MN54 and 82MW) were instrumented with thermocouples, strain gages, and in some cases load cells, that were monitored during the fabrication process to separate the thermal and mechanical strain components. Effects investigated included casting during a cold season, casting during a warm season, casting with the free length of strand covered, and casting with different bed occupancy during any season. A recommended procedure for adjusting strand force during tensioning was proposed to account for non-recoverable strand force changes due to temperature changes between tensioning and bond.
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    Experimental Evidence on the Effect of Insurance on Producer Behavior in the Face of Price Risk
    (2019-08) Kadam, Aditi
    Production risks can be caused by indirect factors such as weather, and direct factors such as price. Failure of constructing resilient financial markets to mitigate these price risks, can cause damaging and lasting impacts to the economy. This study contributes to the literature on risk and uncertainty by testing the effect of insurance, both full and partial, on producer behavior in the face of price risk. I use an experimental setting to address the relationship between behavior under price risk uncertainty, and how that behavior is shaped in the presence of insurance. I find that participants do not adjust their production choices in situations of price risk. When provided with insurance, they do increase production significantly, and reduce it when it is unavailable. The positive effect of full insurance, is higher than that of partial insurance. By comparing the effect of partial, and full insurance, I find evidence for moral hazard.
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    Information seeking versus avoiding: How do college students respond to stress-related information?
    (2016-06) Shi, Weijia
    Focusing on the population of college students in the health context of stress and stress management, this study used an experimental design to test whether the variables of risk perception, response efficacy, self-efficacy, and source credibility can influence health information engagement. Results showed that both risk perception and response efficacy were positively associated with information seeking and negatively associated with information avoiding, but only risk perception had a strong and statistically significant influence on information engagement. No interaction or moderating effects were found. The implications of these findings for information engagement research and strategic health communication are discussed.