2 options
Essays on cooperation with public information.
- Format:
- Book
- Thesis/Dissertation
- Author/Creator:
- Hu, Xiangting.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Economics.
- Economics, General.
- Economics, Theory.
- 0501.
- 0511.
- Penn dissertations--Economics.
- Economics--Penn dissertations.
- Local Subjects:
- Economics, General.
- Economics, Theory.
- Penn dissertations--Economics.
- Economics--Penn dissertations.
- 0501.
- 0511.
- Physical Description:
- 99 pages
- Contained In:
- Dissertation Abstracts International 74-02A(E).
- System Details:
- Mode of access: World Wide Web.
- text file
- Summary:
- The first chapter of this dissertation discusses sellers' feedback in online transactions. Based on the assumption that both product quality and price affect the distribution of feedback, this chapter shows that an equilibrium in which low-quality products are transacted most of the time can always lead to overwhelmingly positive feedback. Specifically, a seller who is currently not trusted by buyers will provide low-quality products, but will also set lower prices to signal the product quality and induce positive ratings. Those periods during which the seller sells low-quality products at low prices are viewed as "trust-accumulation periods." This chapter further shows that in an equilibrium in which low-quality products are provided most of the time, the seller needs to undergo a large number of trust-accumulation periods and, thus, will almost always receive positive ratings.
- The second chapter considers the repeated prisoner's dilemma in a large-population random matching setting when there is a public signal, known as media reporting, at the end of each period. In this setting, players are anonymous and are unable to recognize past opponents. This chapter first shows that when cooperation is sustained in an equilibrium, public information can help to restore social cooperation once it has been broken, and with a large enough population size, more-sensitive media help restore social cooperation more quickly. In addition, as the population size goes to infinity, this chapter shows that public information helps improve cooperation when there is no noise. However, public information may not help sustain cooperation in a noisy environment in which each player has a small but positive probability of deviating in each period. When the population size goes to infinity, even if the probability of deviation goes to zero, conditional on the expectation that the total number of deviations will be one, there is no cooperation sustained by public strategy for any discount factor with any reporting function if the profit from a deviation is not too small.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. in Economics) -- University of Pennsylvania, 2012.
- Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 74-02(E), Section: A.
- Adviser: Andrew Postlewaite.
- Local Notes:
- School code: 0175.
- ISBN:
- 9781267714015
- Access Restriction:
- Restricted for use by site license.
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