Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Human Ecology: Family Resource Management

With increasing income uncertainty during the Great Recession, many households might have had difficulty in projecting future income changes. Ideally, a household should consider lifetime wealth and the distinction between transitory and permanent income changes in making saving decisions, but during the Great Recession it was probably very difficult for households to identify which income changes were transitory. Gain-loss utility based on prospect theory assumes that household inter-temporal decisions are determined not only by current or permanent income but also by their own expectations or assessment about income and income uncertainty in the first period. In this study, how households' perception of their past and future income compared to reference points in the first period and how households' perception of their income uncertainty change affect saving decisions in the second period and between the periods were examined with estimates of future income change. Saving decisions were tested based on relative gain and loss utility using loss aversion theory of consumption and a two period model. Possible asymmetric saving responses between positive and negative changes in reference dependent income and uncertainty were also analyzed. The 2007 and 2009 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) panel dataset was used. Both total and subsamples were analyzed based on the expected income change measure to identify possible asymmetry of saving in response to a set of reference dependent income and uncertainty variables, such as deviation from normal income, expected income change, and income uncertainty change, as well as the effect on saving measured in two ways, savings between 2007 and 2009 and whether or not saved in 2009. This study found a set of reference dependent income and uncertainty variables had significant effects on saving decisions of households and asymmetric saving responses between negative and positive changes in those variables. H (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kathryn Stafford (Advisor); Sherman Hanna (Committee Member); Robert Scharff (Committee Member) Subjects: Home Economics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Public Policy and Management

In the age of climate change, the tension between greening the economy and improving the welfare of vulnerable groups has become one of the most salient policy issues. In the U.S., a quarter of households spend more than six percent of their incomes on energy bills, bringing the need for a just energy transition into focus. My dissertation consists of three essays that explore how to design energy policies for more efficient consumption among low-to-moderate-income individuals and the democratic implications of energy development. I take an interdisciplinary perspective integrating insights from behavioral economics, psychology, and political science to inform the design and responsiveness of energy policymaking. Essay One investigates the effect of information framing on households' willingness to sign up for energy efficiency programs. In the U.S., many low- and moderate-income individuals spend a significant portion of their income on energy bills. Although energy efficiency investments help alleviate energy costs in the long term, it is commonly observed that consumers underinvest in energy efficiency measures and behave as if they heavily discounted future energy savings, a phenomenon termed energy efficiency gap (Allcott & Greenstone, 2012). I investigate whether loss- or gain-framed information about energy efficiency programs impacts individuals' willingness to take up such programs and how income level and regulatory focus are associated with framing's effect on the take-up willingness. Identifying effective framing strategies for residential energy efficiency programs will help spur program take-up willingness, decreasing the energy burden of consumers through improving the built environment of their homes. Essay Two explores how information campaigns can boost households' energy efficiency cognitions and intentions to adopt energy efficiency behavior. Low- and moderate-income individuals can benefit from energy savings accrued from using energy effi (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Hongtao Yi (Committee Chair); Lorraine Whitmarsh (Committee Member); Caezilia Loibl (Committee Member); Stephanie Moulton (Committee Member) Subjects: Public Policy

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2020, Leadership and Change

Even before the COVID-19 Pandemic, higher education has been facing unprecedented threats to existing business models. Small, private colleges heavily dependent on tuition revenue are particularly at risk. These at-risk small, private colleges need to make significant changes if they are to stave off decline and turn themselves around. Most of the literature on turnarounds of colleges and universities is focused primarily on the president, and is largely the reminiscences of former presidents. The board of trustees, however, is the ultimate governing authority of a college/university. If an at-risk institution needs to change in order to survive, the board must recognize and accept the need to change, and then use its authority to take the necessary actions. Private college boards, however, are not generally known for embracing change. This dissertation used comparative case study of three small, private colleges that successfully turned around to examine how their boards of trustees that oversaw and contributed to their decline became capable of overseeing and contributing to their turnaround. Each of the colleges studied had experienced at least three consecutive years of seven figure operating deficits followed by at least two consecutive years of seven figure operating surpluses. Semi-structured interviews with the presidents, board chairs, influential trustees, CFO's, and other cabinet level staff members were done at each institution. The interview data were triangulated with Integrated Postsecondary Data System (IPEDS) data, tax returns, audited financial statements, articles in the press, trustee bios, presidential speeches and writings, and legal filings. The current findings suggest that in the decline phase, boards of trustees suffer from problem blindness, loss aversion, and optimism bias. Turning around required hiring a president more similar to a corporate CEO than an academic, moving fast to cut expenses, and recruiting diverse board members open to (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jon Wergin Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Laurien Alexandre Ph.D. (Committee Member); Terrence MacTaggart Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Education Finance; Educational Leadership; Higher Education; Higher Education Administration

Doctor of Business Administration, Cleveland State University, 2017, Monte Ahuja College of Business

Housing markets exhibit some puzzling behavior that cannot be completely explained by rational market dynamics. The neoclassical economic theory posits that rational sellers and rational buyers in the housing market will look at the current market price in order to determine a value of a property. Studies, however, show that physiological biases may affect the decision- making process of both sellers and buyers. I examine the behavior of sellers in the housing market in three different settings. In essay 1, I analyze the effects of the health of the housing market on mobility. In Essay 2, I study the effects of sellers' loss aversion on listing price and time on the market within the prospect theory framework. In Essay 3, I focus on identifying stress in the housing market by developing a stress index and commencing the design of an Early Warning System that incorporates signals from the market and behaviors from sellers to indicate increasing levels of pressure. I utilize a data set of private home sale transactions of corporate relocations for the period 2004-2014. The results of the first study from the stepwise logit models on series of economic variables and demographic factors show that relocating employees facing negative equity situations and equity less than 5% of home value have a greater chance of rejecting relocation while economic factors like affordability and credit availability have a positive effect on their ability to move. Essay 2 results indicate that a seller who faces a loss will set up an asking price 5.69 percent higher than they would otherwise. Additionally, sellers facing a loss will experience a reduction in the hazard rate of sale resulting in longer time on the market while income and family status have effect on loss aversion and time on market. In the last essay, I hypothesize that economic signals and home sellers' behaviors can explain the variability of the housing market stress index proxied by a transformed S″P500/Case Shi (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Alan Reichert Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Haigang Zhou Ph.D. (Committee Co-Chair); Dieter Gramlich Ph.D. (Committee Member); Walter Rom Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Finance

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2014, Business: Business Administration

Mounting evidence suggests that subjective value is encoded neurologically using a neural common scale. We address the question of how encoded part-values are integrated to form overall value. Our results are based on three broad biological considerations that impact this process – positivity, detectability, and boundedness; mechanisms that are strongly supported in the literatures of neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology. We show that these three conditions lead to a specific functional form to represent the value integration process; a form we refer to as neuroaddition. We show deductively that the neuroadditive theory validates many published results from experimental programs in behavioral decision theory, including loss aversion, the endowment effect, and non-compensatory information processing. The dissertation capitalizes on these deductive results to develop statistical estimation routines – maximum likelihood and MCMC hBayes – for a multinomial logit model that uses the new operator in place of standard addition. The dissertation offers experimental tests of predicted consequences and draws strategic implications from the new theory. Positive outcomes in these tests support the integration of known behavioral effects into the new product design process.

Committee: David Curry Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Jordan Louviere Ph.D. (Committee Member); David Szymanski Ph.D. (Committee Member); Hsiang-Li Chiang Ph.D. (Committee Member); Jeffrey Mills Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Marketing

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2009, Business: Business Administration

This dissertation investigates substantive questions developed from Kahneman and Tversky's behavioral choice theory. Behavioral choice theory postulates systematic departures from economically rational behavior when consumers face choices described incompletely or probabilistically. Previous research relies nearly exclusively on monetary options, which are intrinsically unidimensional and exhibit monotone utility. These special properties are likely to influence the frequency of preference reversals and other so-called non-rational behaviors in human decision-making. Four contributions emerge from this research. First, I extend the idea of risky choices from monetary to non-monetary options and build a theoretical framework with a foundation in prospect theory and reason-based choice. Second, I test the effect of multidimensional vs. unidimensional non-monetary options on choice focusing on both within- and between-dimensional risk. Third, I examine loss aversion across segments and relate an aggregation fallacy to contradictory results in the literature. Fourth, I suggest an extension of Kahneman and Tversky's behavioral choice theory by incorporating options with missing information. I use three discrete choice experiments to generate decision schema by segments of individuals sharing similar utility functions. Latent class discrete-choice models isolate the direction and magnitude of value for each attribute (level) of a set of multi-attribute options. They do so in choice domains involving both monetary and non-monetary attributes and operate effectively at both the aggregate and segment levels. As such, they support the rigorous design of experiments that circumvent the need to rely on monetary gambles. Study 1 investigates the influence of monetary (vs. non-monetary) goals on multidimensional risky choice when full information on reference points is available to an individual. Findings support goal-driven behavior, but reveal only limited evidence to supp (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: David J. Curry PhD (Committee Chair); Frank R. Kardes PhD (Committee Member); Jordan J. Louviere PhD (Committee Member); James J. Kellaris PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Marketing

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2006, Business Administration : Finance

While many studies have revealed that experimental subjects and individual investors display behaviors associated with overconfidence, fewer authors have investigated whether corporate executives fall prey to these same tendencies. This dissertation examines the impact of nine overconfidence-linked individual characteristics on the financial decisions of CEOs from domestic exchange-traded firms. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 focus on firms' capital investment, acquisition, and disposition activities, respectively. Overall, the overconfidence-linked variables do not consistently and significantly affect the aforementioned financial decisions. There are, however, a few exceptions. First, CEOs' press portrayal and ownership stakes correlate with their firms' relative investment rates and investment-free cash flow sensitivities. Second, CEOs who face potential competition from a larger number of operating segment vice presidents have higher acquisition and disposition likelihoods. Third, acquisitions' announcement returns significantly increase (decrease) with CEOs' stockholdings (tenure). While behavioral explanations exist for most of these relationships, so do agency justifications. Altogether, our lack of results contradict the findings of Malmendier and Tate (2005a,b) and could imply that firms are structured in such a way so as to control for managerial overconfidence.

Committee: Dr. Steve Wyatt (Advisor) Subjects: Business Administration, General

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Toledo, 2009, Psychology

“Decision making inertia” is a term loosely used to describe the similar nature of a variety of decision making biases that predominantly favor a decision to maintain one course of action over switching to a new course. Three of these biases, the sunk cost effect, status-quo bias, and inaction inertia are discussed here. Combining earlier work on strength of handedness and the sunk cost effect along with new findings regarding counterfactual thought, this work principally seeks to determine if counterfactual thought may drive the three decision biases of note while also analyzing common relationships between the biases, strength of handedness, and the variables of regret and loss aversion. Over a series of experiments, it was found that handedness differences did exist in the three biases discussed, that amount and type of counterfactuals generated did not predict choice within the status-quo bias, and that the remaining variables potentially thought to drive the biases presented did not link causally to them. This is important as it suggests that decision making inertia, if it does exist, is not tied to one common antecedent.

Committee: John D. Jasper PhD (Committee Chair); Stephen D. Christman PhD (Committee Member); Rickye E. Heffner PhD (Committee Member); Kamala L. London PhD (Committee Member); Michael E. Doherty PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, Natural Resources

The realm of environmental policy and management requires that decision makers weigh a diverse set of objectives and evaluate alternatives that often seem equally important. In order to ensure that all of the decision relevant information is incorporated in a manner that produces well-informed judgments it is important to understand what motivates choice behavior in these contexts. The research presented in this dissertation tests the relevance of several key findings from behavioral decision theory for predicting and explaining choice behavior in common environmental policy and management decision contexts. Specifically, an experiment designed to test extensions of the evaluability hypothesis demonstrated that the affective characteristics of problem context may actually work to override gains in the evaluability of the risk attributes brought on by side-by-side comparisons. This behavioral tendency is referred to as “affect-based value neglect” or the tendency for individuals to place greater weight on their affective reactions to problem context at the expense of decision relevant risk information. Another experiment designed to test extensions of prospect theory into the way individuals attribute value to the gains and losses of others demonstrated that individuals have a difficult time differentiating between the impact of gains and losses in emotionally significant contexts (e.g., environmental protection, job security). The results also revealed a lack of trust in the ability of unknown others to appreciate the significant impact of a loss. Overall, the research presented in this dissertation points to the power of affective reactions and their tendency to influence or even dominate choice behavior. Decision making authorities need to pay careful attention to the factors that motivate choices in environmental policy and management decision processes. An over reliance on simplifying heuristics may bias the decision making process and lead to outcomes that do n (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Virginie Bouchard (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, Family Resource Management

The main purpose of this dissertation is to explore household saving using a prospect theory approach through the use of the loss aversion model and behavioral portfolio theory. The research begins by investigating the effect of having expected per-period income above or below the reference level as well as the effect of uncertainty on the likelihood of saving based on the loss aversion model. The focus then moves to saving motives based on the ideas of behavioral portfolio theory. The direct measure of saving available in the dataset is saving over the previous year. Saving horizon is also investigated since the saving measure is a short-term measure and some regular savers may not have saved during the past year. The dataset used is the 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances. The sample excludes retired U.S. households for a final number of 3,694 households. Having expected per-period income above the reference level increases the likelihood of saving. Having expected per-period income below the reference level is significantly and negatively related to the likelihood of saving, and has a greater effect on the likelihood of saving than having expected per-period income above the reference. The group of uncertainty variables is significant in explaining the likelihood of saving. In contrast to the theories reviewed, most of the uncertainty variables are not found to increase the likelihood of saving. Saving motives and saving horizon are significant in explaining the likelihood of saving. Saving for a foreseeable expense significantly increases the likelihood of saving in both the models with and without interaction terms. Having a motive to save for the education of children or grandchildren significantly decreases the likelihood of saving in the model without interactions, while this variable is not significant when interactions are added. Inclusion of interactions of saving horizon variables with the saving motive variables is found to be significant in explaining the (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Catherine Montalto (Advisor) Subjects: