| 1. |
- Löfström, Tuwe, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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Collusion in algorithmic pricing
- 2021
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- De senaste årens teknologiska utveckling har möjliggjort för autonoma agenter att utnyttja artificiell intelligens för att lära sig optimerade prispolicyer genom att interagera med marknaden. Både konkurrensmyndigheter och forskare har uttryckt oro för att autonoma prisoptimerande agenter som oberoende av varandra agerar på samma marknad kan lära sig varandras policyer genom den implicita interaktionen. Deras oro är att agenterna på så sätt når ett prisutfall som liknar regelrätt prissamarbete.Den här rapporten avser att: förklara hur algoritmer som används för automatiserad prisoptimering fungerar; presentera en litteraturgenomgång kring automatiserad prisoptimering och prissamarbete; genomföra och presentera resultaten från en samling av experiment som utvärderar flera tidigare outforskade aspekter kring självlärande och autonoma prisoptimerande agenter; och, slutligen, presentera slutsatser som dragits utifrån litteraturgenomgången och de genomförda experimenten.De genomförda empiriska experimenten kompletterar befintlig forskning genom att utvärdera agenter som är olika varandra eller som agerar asynkront, vilket efterliknar den situation som råder när inget explicit samarbete existerar.Våra resultat tillsammans med tidigare forskning implicerar att prisoptimerande agenter kan förväntas nå prisutfall i närheten av dem som råder vid regelrätt prissamarbete, oavsett hur starka agenter som används. Vidare så implicerar den empiriska undersökningen att företag kan uppnå konkurrensfördelar genom att kontinuerligt förbättra sina prisoptimerande agenter. Slutligen så visar våra resultat även att hotet att nya aktörer ger sig in på marknaden hämmar prisutvecklingen och resulterar ireducerade prisnivåer.
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| 2. |
- Akay, Alpaslan, 1975, et al.
(författare)
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Relative concerns and sleep behavior
- 2019
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Ingår i: Economics and Human Biology. - : Elsevier BV. - 1570-677X .- 1873-6130. ; 33, s. 1-14
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We investigate the relationship between relative concerns with respect to income and the quantity and quality of sleep using a 6-year panel dataset on the sleep behavior of people in Germany. We find a substantial negative association between relative income and number of hours of sleep and satisfaction with sleep, i.e., sleep quality, whereas there is no particular association between absolute level of income and sleep quantity and quality. A 10-percent increase in the income of relevant others is associated with 6–8 min decrease in a person's weekly amount of sleep on average, yet this effect is particularly strong among the relatively deprived, i.e., upward comparers, as this group shows a corresponding decrease in sleeping time of 10–12 min/week. These findings are highly robust to several specification checks, including measures of relative concerns, reference group, income inequality, and local price differences. The heterogeneity analysis reveals that the relationship is mainly driven by people with relatively fewer working hours, a higher demand for household production and leisure activities, and lower physical health and well-being. © 2018 Elsevier B.V.
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| 3. |
- Akay, Alpaslan, 1975, et al.
(författare)
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I Can’t Sleep! Relative Concerns and Sleep Behavior
- 2017
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- We investigate the effect of relative concerns with respect to income on the quantity and quality of sleep using a long panel dataset on the sleep behavior of people in Germany. We find that relative income has a substantial negative effect on number of hours of sleep on weekdays and overall satisfaction with sleep, i.e., sleep quality, whereas absolute income has no particular effect on sleep behavior. The findings are robust to several speci.cation checks, including measures of relative concerns, reference group, income inequality, and local price differences. The paper also investigates the importance of the potential channels including working hours, time-use activities, and physical and mental health to explain how relative concerns relate to sleep behavior. The results reveal that while all of these channels partially contribute to the effect, it appears to be mainly driven by physical and mental health and overall and financial well-being/stress. We also use a subjective well-being valuation approach to calculate the monetary value of sleep lost due to income comparisons. The total cost is as high as about 2.6 billion euro/year (1.8% of the overall monetary value of sleep and 1.3% of total health expenditures) among the working-age population in Germany.
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| 4. |
- Ralsmark, Hilda
(författare)
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Education, norms, and gender equality
- 2017
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Despite major developments in gender equality, differences between men and women’s economic and social behaviors remain. Several studies demonstrate the importance of gender norms in explaining a significant part of the gender gap. But what shapes gender norms? I provide evidence on the role of education, considered to be a key factor to reach gender equality, in influencing attitudes on gender norms in two different domains: the labor market and household. Exploiting educational reforms in Europe, I find that mandatory education and years of education significantly reduces individuals’ level of agreement on the gender norm that the man should be the breadwinner but not on the gender norm that the woman should be the homemaker. The result is consistent with the hypothesis that part of the ”stalled revolution” in gender equality is because norms in the household are more rigid than in the labor market, and that educated women face a dilemma between a career and family, or a double burden where they continue to do the lion’s share of household work.
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| 5. |
- Ralsmark, Hilda
(författare)
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Media visibility and social tolerance: Evidence from USA
- 2017
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- I study the impact of media visibility of people of colour on the rate of hate crimes motivated by race or ethnicity in the United States. To do so, I construct a novel measure of state-level media visibility of people of colour between 2007 and 2013. Comparing state-level variation in the hate crime rate with a measure of the one-year lagged state-level variation in media visibility, I find that an increase in media visibility reduces the number of hate crimes. The effect is not larger in states that used to be pro-slavery, but larger in states that are more prone to spontaneous emotional outbursts of hate. The result, which is robust to several checks, is in the line with the argument that "visibility matters."
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| 6. |
- Ralsmark, Hilda
(författare)
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Family, Friend, or Foe? Essays in Empirical Microeconomics
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of four studies that deal with how individual outcomes are shaped by social interactions. The scope of the thesis ranges from relationships between individuals in what is arguably the most fundamental building block in society today — the family — to more generalized relationships between different groups in society. The first study examines whether twins’ inferior health at birth matters when twinning is used to identify the causal effect of family size on child outcomes. We use twin zygosity to vary twin’s health at birth. The motivation for this is that monozygotic (identical) twins have been found to be of lower health at birth than dizygotic (fraternal) twins are, along the same dimensions that separate twins from singletons. We find that zygosity matters for the twin instrumental variable estimate of the effect of family size on earnings. This suggests that parents do respond to twins’ birth endowment in a way that can mask any negative effect of family size on child outcomes that may exist. The second study examines the importance of family size on child health. We model child health as a special type of human capital that is the result of both parental investment and environmental factors. Family size, therefore, affects child health via two mechanisms. First, family size has a negative effect on child health via a dilution effect of parental resources. Second, family size has a positive effect on the development of the immune system due to increased exposure to pathogens, bacteria, parasites, and viruses at a young age. We find that family size has a positive effect on health and that the effect is larger if family formation is relatively fast. This speaks in favor of the idea that early exposure to pathogens, bacteria, parasites, and viruses is an important input in the health production function. The third study exploits the 1996 divorce law reform in Ireland to examine the effect of changes in the divorce law that make it easier to divorce on the general well-being of spouses. I find that allowing people to get divorced increased the well-being of both women and men, and it increased the well-being of women the most. The results suggest that the divorce reform led to an anticipatory behavior by both spouses that increased their well-being. The results also suggest that the reform led to a shift in the within-household bargaining power toward the wife and made it possible for her to leave a bad marriage, which further increased women’s well-being. The fourth study examines the effect of media visibility of people of color on social tolerance toward people due to their race. Using US state-level data, I find that an increase in the number of hours of media visibility of people of color leads to a fall in the rate of hate crimes motivated by race the following year. The results suggest that an increase in media visibility of minority groups can be an important tool to increase social tolerance and reduce any potential conflicts that may arise between different groups in society.
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| 7. |
- Lundborg, Petter, et al.
(författare)
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When a Little Dirt Doesn’t Hurt : The Effect of Family Size on Child Health Outcomes
- 2013
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- : This paper studies the causal effect of family size on children’s health. We formulate a model of child health production where family size has a negative effect on child health due to resource dilution but a positive effect due to a positive effect on the development of the immune system, as proposed by the hygiene hypothesis. We use a large dataset on the entire Swedish male birth cohorts between 1965 and 1978 to evaluate which effect that dominates. We use the occurrence of twin births as exogenous shifts in family size. Overall, our results suggest that family size has a positive effect on general health outcomes. This suggests that the mechanism proposed in the hygiene hypothesis dominates the mechanism proposed in the quantity-quality model.
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