A company-based lottery was used to reduce the number of nonessential miles employees drove their personal cars each day and thereby save gasoline. Employees were divided into an experimental and a contrast group. The experimental design involved two conditions: (a) a baseline in which no consequences were attached to driving behavior, and (b) a month-long lottery in which the experimentals wer...

Sunspot equilibrium and lottery equilibrium are two stochastic solution concepts for nonstochastic economies. Recent work by Garratt, Keister, Qin, and Shell (in press) and Kehoe, Levine, and Prescott (in press) on nonconvex exchange economies has shown that when the randomizing device is continuous, applying the two concepts to the same fundamental economy yields the same set of equilibrium al...

School districts that adopt the Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanism to assign students to schools face the tradeoff between fairness and efficiency when selecting how to break ties among equivalent students. We analyze a model with with random generated preferences for students and compare two mechanisms differing by their tie-breaking rules: DA with one single lottery (DA-STB) and DA with a sep...

Over the past several years, there has been growing use of the draft lottery instrument to study political attitudes and behaviors (see, e.g., Bergan 2009; Erikson and Stoker 2011; Henderson 2012; Davenport 2015). Draft lotteries, held in the United States from 1969 to 1972, provide a potentially powerful design; in theory, they should provide true randomization for the “treatment” of military ...

How Important Is Selection? Experimental vs. Non-Experimental Measures of the Income Gains from Migration Measuring the gain in income from migration is complicated by non-random selection of migrants from the general population, making it hard to obtain an appropriate comparison group of non-migrants. This paper uses a migrant lottery to overcome this problem, providing an experimental measure...

This paper assesses the performance of two Java frameworks for high performance computing (HPC) on networks of workstations (NOWs). The lottery-based work stealing algorithm is intrinsically distributed, and consequetly scalable to an extremely large number of participant workstations. Although proved to be near optimal for the distribution of well-structured multithreaded computations across l...

Second-order stochastic dominance answers the question “Under what conditions will all risk-averse agents prefer x̃2 to x̃1?” Consider the following related question: “Under what conditions will all risk-averse agents who prefer lottery x̃1 to a reference lottery ω̃ also prefer lottery x̃2 to that reference lottery?” Each of these two questions is an example of a broad category of questions of great...

This paper investigates the impact on response quantity and quality of a diaryand bookletbased survey of using different interview methods and lottery prizes. In addition to a conventional questionnaire the survey included time-diaries for household members and a booklet for recording the previous month’s spending by the household. The respondents could choose to use either CATI (Computer-Assis...

BACKGROUND A two-step selection procedure, consisting of a non-academic and an academic step, was recently shown to select students with a 2.6 times lower risk of early dropout and a higher clerkship Grade Point Average (GPA) than lottery-admitted controls. AIM To determine the relative contribution of the non-academic and academic steps to differences found in student performance. METHOD L...

People migrate to improve their well-being, whether through an expansion of economic and social opportunities or a reduction in persecution. Yet a large literature suggests that migration can be a very stressful process, with potentially negative impacts on mental health reducing the net benefits of migration. However, to truly understand the effect of migration on mental health one must compar...