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Browsing by Subject "game theory"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Comparison of the partner institutions’ perceptions of the cross-border higher education program and the impact on program implementation: case studies of two Sino-U.S. business management programs.
    (2011-07) Jie, Yiyun
    This study examined discrepancies and similarities between the partner institutions' perceptions of the motivations, expected outcomes, and desired strategies achieving such outcomes in their cross-border higher educational programs from a game theory perspective, in the context of Mainland China (hereafter referred to as China). By comparing the key stakeholders' perceptions from the partner institutions, this study identified compatibility and potential conflicts between the partner institutions involved in cross-border higher educational programs and to analyze these discrepancies and similarities in relation to program implementation strategies to identify potential impact they could have on the program implementation. Two Sino-U.S. business management programs were used as cases to answer the set of research questions that are informed by game theory. A conceptual framework that is grounded in international education, strategic management, and game theory, was devised to capture the dynamic phenomena in cross-border education. This study found that regardless of the institutions' home country (China or the United States) and their institutional type, similar types of motivations and expected outcomes were identified across all four participating institutions (those with official accreditation). These motivations and expected outcomes included 1) brand recognition and academic reputation, 2) strategic positioning, 3) capacity development and learning, and 4) revenue generation. However, institutions appeared to have different interpretations of these openly stated motivations and expected outcomes, based on their own institutional contexts. The findings suggested that within each partner institution, faculty and administrations (including leaders) sometimes placed a different level of emphasis on expected outcomes, even though key stakeholder groups shared a common understanding around the institutional motivations and expected outcomes mostly as a baseline outcome. The key participants from both partner institutions tended to apply their own interpretation references to their partners, which led to misperceptions between the partners. Moreover, findings from this study suggest that the strong compatibility between the partners' motivations, expected outcomes, and the preferences of various outcomes made the joint-venture model most appealing to both the Chinese and the U.S. institutions. This compatibility mostly focused on the outcomes of brand recognition, academic reputation, strategic positioning, and financial sustainability of the collaborative programs. Potential conflicts existed between the partners' preferences around these outcomes in the long run, especially between brand promotion and revenue generation. As the collaborative programs continued to evolve and possible external environmental changes occurred, so did the partners' expected outcomes and the related preferences. As a result, the partners tried to make changes and/or added new components to the original chosen strategy. Therefore, although the collaborative programs had been successfully established with the chosen desired strategies, there were potential conflicting discrepancies between the partners' expected outcomes and preferences for various aspects of the desired strategies at a later stage.
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    The economics of animal communication: theory and experiments integrating receiver choice and strategic signal reliability
    (2015-12) Polnaszek, Timothy
    This research centers on two themes fundamental to communication, signal reliability and receiver tolerance of imperfect reliability (abbreviated as receiver tolerance). Focus on signal reliability tends to dominate research on signaler-receiver interactions, but represents only half of the signaling dyad. Understanding why signals are reliable and why receivers follow imperfect reliability are equally important; I argue the combination of reliability and receiver tolerance to ultimately determines the form and stability of signaler-receiver interactions. To explore these themes, I first developed a model of signaling interactions that combines aspects of models of receiver choice and signal reliability. The results highlight the co-importance of receiver tolerance and reliability enforcement mechanisms (such as signal cost). To experimentally test the model predictions, I developed a novel laboratory signaling game that allows control over theoretically important variables (such as the level of conflict between the signaler and receiver). The game placed blue jay subjects (Cyanocitta cristata) in a signal-response game played for food rewards. A series of these signaling-game experiments demonstrate the effects of signal cost on signal reliability (or honesty) and show the extent to which uncertainty in the environment generates receiver tolerance. Signal cost is an important topic in signaling theory, but lacks direct empirical support. I show that high signal cost does increase honesty under conditions of conflict, but also that cost is unnecessary in mutualistic conditions. I also show that receiver tolerance increases when environments are uncertain (to the point that receivers are gullible), and that signalers are sensitive to the level of receiver tolerance – exploiting tolerance when signaler and receiver interests conflict. Taken together, these models and experiments establish the value of considering both signal reliability and receiver tolerance.
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    The Effect of Punishing "Over-Contributors" on Overall Welfare: Some Experimental Evidence
    (2015-07) Biesanz, Zachary
    A public goods environment was constructed to simulate a dilemma in which corporate managers choose between acts of corporate social responsibility and acts of profitability. An experiment was conducted to determine the effect of a penalty for contributing above a specific level. The penalty has significant effects, encouraging free riding and suppressing contributions at all levels, even though most contributions would not have triggered the penalty.
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    Essays on Marketing Strategies in Online Advertising
    (2022-05) Zhuang, Lei
    Digital advertising expenditures in the United States reached 139.8 billion in 2020, a 12.2% increase from 2019. Along with the rapid growth of ad spending, ad platforms adopt several marketing strategies, aiming to make online advertising more effective. In this dissertation, I model and provide insights to some of the main challenges that online advertising currently faces. In the first chapter, I study advertisers’ learning of consumer information enabled by tracking technology and examine how the learning incentives affect advertisers’ bidding strategies across time. It is shown that when the differentiation between advertisers is low, the pursuit of individualized information motivates advertisers to overbid (bid more than expected consumer valuation) and the learning of consumer information increases advertisers’ auction competition in the first stage. On the other hand, when advertisers are highly differentiated, our findings suggest that despite the value of information, advertisers may prefer being ignorant and thus are motivated to start with underbidding (bid less than expected consumer valuation). Thus, the learning of consumer information could decrease advertisers’ auction competition in the first stage. Furthermore, our analysis also shows that it may not always be in the ad platform’s best interest to adopt tracking technology that allows advertisers to learn consumer information over time. In the second chapter, I study the quality score, an index introduced by ad platforms to rank advertisers in auction, and examine optimal quality investments for heterogeneous advertisers to increase their quality score. The results suggest that a quality score function that rewards bidders in excess of their click-through rates does increase the quality investments but in a non-monotonic way. Higher rewards of landing page quality do not necessarily mean higher investments. Furthermore, such an improvement in quality levels often comes with a sacrifice of the auction revenue despite the higher bids. While the potential revenue impact for the auctioneer depends on the bidding strategies and auction formats, there exists a quality score function that ensures increased revenues by rewarding quality improvement.
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    Tolling at a Frontier: A Game Theoretic Analysis
    (Elsevier Science Publishing Company, Incorporated, 1999) Levinson, David M
    Frontiers provide an opportunity for one jurisdiction to remedy inequities (and even exploit them) in highway finance by employing toll-booths, and thereby ensuring the highest possible share of revenue from non-residents. If one jurisdiction sets policy in a vacuum, it is clearly advantageous to impose as high a toll on non-residents as can be supported. However, the neighboring jurisdiction can set policy in response. This establishes the potential for a classical prisoner's dilemma consideration: in this case to tax (cooperate) or to toll (defect). Even if both jurisdictions would together raise as much revenue from taxes as from tolls (and perhaps more since taxes may have lower collection costs), the equilibrium solution in game theory, under a one-shot game, is for both parties to toll. However in the case of a repeated game, cooperation (taxes and possibly revenue sharing) which has lower collection costs is stable.