Three Essays On Low Price Guarantees PDF Download

This dissertation contributes three essays to emerging topics in Economics. The first essay examines the role of institutional weaknesses--specifically, weakly defined or enforced property rights--in keeping poor countries heavily dependent on their natural resource base through trade. The essay shows, theoretically and empirically, that a country with weaker property rights will inefficiently under-price its resource base, and export more resource-based goods even to countries that have equally weak property rights. The second essay explores how a firm’s overconfidence about catastrophic environmental risks influences the optimal contract that a regulator writes to reduce the risk at minimal cost. The results show that overconfidence can matter in two important ways: If the firm overestimates the impact of precautionary effort in reducing risk, the optimal contract attains more environmental protection at lower social costs. If the firm, however, underestimates the impact of precautionary effort, the contract is less efficient. Environmental protection is costlier. Moreover, in this case, ignoring the firm’s overconfidence can lead to excessive risk-taking. The third essay explores the interactive economic dynamics of attention and habit formation in the presence of time-inconsistent preferences in mitigating self-control issues. Recent studies in the psychological literature find that self-control is less about resisting unhealthy temptations, and more about breaking unhealthy habits and replacing them with healthy ones. The essay develops a model of habit formation consistent with this observation. A healthy habit in any given domain, in the model, takes a period of sustained attention to form. But, once established, these healthy habits allow an individual to free up scarce \attentional resources," which can then be used to establish healthy habits in other domains. The model has interesting policy implications. It suggests, among other things, that information campaigns or other policies aimed at preventing unhealthy behaviors are best targeted at individuals whose habits are in flux: freshman college students, for example, or people who have recently moved or changed jobs. It also suggests that such policies might have counter-intentional consequences: taxing cigarettes might lead to wide-spread obesity through the channel of cross-domain self-control failures.