/pdf/the-review-of-economic-studies-209dovqisz.pdf

The review of economic studies

A STRATEGY FROM CHEMISTS at Columbia University has enabled the first syntheses of several members of a structurally intricate family of oligomeric compounds derived from the red wine compound resveratrol ( Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature10197). The team says its work could be applied to multiple classes of compounds. Plant species worldwide make oligomers of resveratrol to fend off fungal infections, and some of these compounds have promising anticancer and anti-HIV activity. Only small quantities can be obtained from natural sources. And they’re a thorny synthetic challenge because resveratrol can connect to itself in myriad ways, whereas units of other natural product oligomers, such as terpenes, typically link to one another in only one or two ways. Starting from resveratrol dimers the researchers had synthesized previously, Scott A. Snyder and coworkers use regioselective bromination reactions to selectively construct resveratrol trimers and tetramers, the highest order resveratrol oligomers prepared yet...

A family affair

We design a laboratory experiment to test for image motives in a setting where decisions signal intelligence to a social audience Money-maximizing behavior in the experiment sorts subjects by academic ability, as measured by performance on verbal analogy questions, across two levels of question difficulty Sorting behavior is publicly revealed in our “audience” treatment, facilitating social signaling In the “intrinsic only” treatment, the signaling mechanism was explained but decisions were kept private In the control, there was no discussion of the signaling mechanism and all decisions were private We find that intrinsic only subjects were significantly more likely to choose the high-type action than the control In comparison, subjects were significantly less likely to choose the signal in the audience treatment, when doing so was publicly observed The effects are more pronounced in males The results suggest that social observation can demotivate individuals when decisions signal intelligence, despite evidence that the underlying trait was privately considered desirable Audience effects have a less predictable impact on behavior in this setting as compared to the near universally positive findings from the altruism and trust literature Our experimental design can be easily adapted to study image motives in a broad set of environments using revealed preferences

https://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4808&context=utk_graddiss

Thomas Clayton McManus

Papers

The Effects of Trade Competition on Health, and Determinants of Workplace Behavior