Browsing by Author "Ross, Don"

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    A taxometric analysis of problem gambling data from a South African national urban sample
    (Journal of Gambling Studies, 2015-05-28) Kincaid, Harold; Daniels, Reza Che; Dellis, Andrew; Hofmeyr, Andre; Sharp, Carla; Rousseau, Jacques; Ross, Don
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    Competing paradigms for explaining the etiology of human male homosexual orientation: a case study in the application of the methodology of scientific research programs
    (2003) Mbûgua, Karori; Ross, Don; Odhiambo, Jack
    [pg 41,59-61,71,99,110 ,172,173 missing] This thesis is a case study in the application of the principles of the methodology of scientific research programs to a contemporary scientific debate: the debate concerning the causes and origins of human male homosexual orientation. It begins by identifying two major research programs that seek to explain homosexual phenomenon, namely, the biological and experiential research programs. Using the methodology of research programs as a framework for analysis, the study shows that the two programs have stagnated. Neither of them meets the Lakatosian criterion of 'progressivity'. The study argues that lack of progress in this area may be a consequence of the two groups of researchers, the biologists and the experientialists, rigidly clinging to the hard cores of their respective programs. The study calls for an interactionist approach to the study of homosexual etiology and suggests that such an approach could benefit from recent trends in developmental systems theory and evolutionary psychology. It is also argued that this episode in the history of science undermines the normative generalizability of Lakatos' account of science.
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    Learning, cognition and ideology
    (2003) Ross, Don
    Invited to give the 2000 Rick Turner Memorial Lecture, I pondered the following question: What explains the fact that the sincere thought of a brilliant and heroic person such as Turner can appear preposterous to me, if bad faith or scholarly ignorance on one side or the other are ruled out, as they should be in this case? I address this question by considering what ‘ideologies’ are from the perspective of cognitive learning theory. I describe the dynamics by which pressures for social coordination cause brains to implement alternative natural softwares for performing inferences in complex domains of association and inference. I conclude by noting that this need not imply normative relativism, since the relative justifications for conclusions produced by different softwares can still be debated. My aim is thus not to contest Turner’s ideology or political views, but to partially explain how learning produces differences that transcend factual disagreements and even ethical ones.
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    Moral responsibility for character
    (1997) Lumb, Colin Stewart; Ross, Don
    The aim of my thesis is to fill a gap in virtue ethics. I present an account of moral responsibility that is consistent with the core assumption of virtue ethics, that character and not action is the primary locus of ethical appraisal. Virtue ethics typically does not include a notion of moral responsibility. The reason for this omission is that traditionally attributions of moral responsibility are determined by the causal aetiology of our actions. Because virtue ethics is primarily concerned with our characters and not our actions, virtue ethicists typically assume that causal aetiology is irrelevant to ethics. So, in order to fill the gap in virtue ethics I need to show how the core assumption of virtue ethics does not require virtue ethicists to hold that causal aetiology is irrelevant to ethics. The project of filling this gap in virtue ethics is important because virtue ethics is a popular modern ethical theory and in order to fulfil this ·function it must say something about moral responsibility. It is a deficit of virtue ethics that it provides us with no basis for judgements about moral responsibility. It restricts the scope of ethics to simply grounding moral assessments of our characters. An ethical theory needs to provide a basis for making practical decisions in legal and political matters. My thesis is that by shifting the locus of moral responsibility from the notion of action to that of character, virtue ethics can include a notion of moral responsibility. I present an account of the notion of moral responsibility for character. It operates as an amendment to virtue ethics and is intended to demonstrate how differences in the causal aetiologies of our characters determine the extent to which we can be attributed moral responsibility for them. In contrast to, for example, Classical Utilitarianism ii which holds that being morally responsible is an all-or-nothing affair, my account explains how the differences among the causal aetiologies of our characters create a spectrum along which moral responsibility can be assigned to varying degrees. By focusing on the formation of character and not of action as the basis for attributions of moral responsibility we can make use of the notion of a causal aetiology without being forced to abandon the core assumption of virtue ethics. My method is a standard philosophical method of critical analysis and synthesis of philosophical literature. My account consists of two conditions that are both necessary and together sufficient for making attributions of moral responsibility for character. The first condition, which derives from Harry Frankfurt's theory of moral responsibility, is that we 'identify' with our characters. The second condition, which incorporates Daniel Dennett' s notion of a 'narrative self', is that we are to a significant extent 'morally responsible selves'. My conclusion is that we are morally responsible for our characters only if (1) we are to a significant extent morally responsible selves and (2) we identify with our characters. The extent of the attribution of moral responsibility is determined by the extent to which we identify with our characters.
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    Opportunity costs of trade-related capacity development in Sub-Saharan Africa
    (2010) Mugadza, Tendeukayi; Ross, Don; Edwards, Lawrence
    Recent studies have documented the impact of institutions and infrastructure development on trade flows. This paper studies these issues in the context 010n90in9 trade-related capacity building initiatives and evaluates the opportunity cost of different trade-related capacity building policy mixes. Trade-related technical assistance and capacity building was recognized in 2001 by the World Trade Organisation Doha Ministerial Declaration as a core element of the development dimension of the multilateral trading system and commitments were set out in those areas. The extentof trade-related technical assistance and capacity building to help developing and least developed countries participate more efficiently in international trade has increased by 50% between 2001 and 2004. The purpose of this thesis is to address the question of whether the weights assigned to different components of trade-related capacity building in existing trade-related capacity building programmes are economically justified. To do this the paper evaluates the opportunity costsof different trade-related capacity building policy mixes with specific reference to Sub-Saharan Africa, excluding South Africa. We use a number of variables from both theoretical and empirical literature to come up with composite indicators for trade-related institutions, infrastructure and human capital. The analysis is also informed by interviews with trade experts in Geneva as well as a review of relevant background documents. In the empirical analysis we use 2005 trade patterns for a data set of 117 countries of which 24 are in sub-Saharan Africa. Making use ofa gravity equation augmented with trade-related capacity building variables we run a series of Heckman's two-step selection regressions and estimate the marginal impacts of these trade-related capacity building indicators on trade as measured by value of total exports. To evaluate opportunity costs. we do policy simulations and estimate how much trade flows will be increased under various policy scenarios with respect to improved trade-related capacity building indicators in Sub-Saharan Africa. We examine scenarios that focus on improved institutions. infrastructure and human capital as they move in the direction of comparability with the rest of the world. The world's average level is used as the baseline for each of these composite indicators in the policy simulations. The results show that trade flows exhibit different levels of sensitivity to different trade-related capacity building policy options with the exporter's infrastructure being the most significant with an average elasticity of approximately 3.0. The findings also suggest that complementing improvements in the quality of human capital and infrastructure will provide the greatest bilateral trade flow benefit to Sub-Saharan Africa; while non-Sub-Saharan Africa countries gain the most from complementing infrastructure and institutions. Such a finding contradicts the current focus of ongoing TReB programmes that put emphasis on human capital development only. Building on both Grossman and Helpman (1991),s trade model and Barro (1990) s' growth model, the paper argues that the theoretical propositions are inadequate to address the dynamics associated with trade-related capacity building policy. The paper further argues that analyzing the impact of rReB using these standard frameworks underestimates the impact since policy dynamics are not addressed in that framework. This could contribute to explaining why there has not been consensus in the trade-growth empirical literature, with some authors finding a positive and significant impact of trade on growth, while others argue that the impact is not significant Hence, the paper proposes improvements in the specification of the standard growth model to take into account policy dynamics, specifically assumptions regarding substitutability among TRee investments.
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    A procedure to test human behaviour under producer scrounger conditions
    (2012) Etheredge, George; Ross, Don
    This paper examines the applicability of the ‘producer scrounger’ model, used in the biological literature to model social foraging, to human beings. It is argued that humans do find themselves in economically important situations that can be described by the producer scrounger dynamic.
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    Product innovation as a static game of incomplete information in a non-Bayesian environment
    (2001) Wolf, Guy; Ross, Don
    The apparent failure of incumbent firms to produce radical innovations is one that continues to provoke significant debate in the economic literature. This phenomenon, termed the "Incumbent's Curse" by Chandy and Tellis (2000, p.2) receives significant support. Rosenbloom and Christensen (1994, p.655) go as far as to say that this is one of the "stylised facts" in the innovation literature. The concept of incumbent failure to innovate receives support both in theoretic modelling (e.g. Ghemawat 1991, Reinganum, 1983) and in empirical case studies (e.g. Christensen 1993, Henderson and Clark 1990). Chandy and Tellis (2000) rightly point out however that such literature has focused on industries in which there is such incumbent inertia. There are well documented examples of leadership in a high profile industry changing with new product innovations, e.g. typewriters, computer disks.
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    Regulation of choice behavior : an experiment investigating the hypothesis that people bundle sequences of expected rewards
    (2015) Schuhr, Alexander; Ross, Don; Harrison, Glenn W
    This thesis discusses reward bundling as a process that enables decision makers to self-regulate their choice behavior. Most empirical work on intertemporal choice has focused on analyzing impulsive choice. Less effort has been dedicated to explanations of how individuals manage to overcome self-defeating behavior. This thesis evaluates the theory of reward bundling. It presents a set of econometric tools that can be employed to investigate whether actual choice behavior is consistent with the theory of bundling. It reports an experiment with human subjects. Reward bundling has been demonstrated in experiments with pigeons and rats. However, no empirical study using salient rewards and sound econometric model estimation has ever been carried out with humans. The present experiment is, therefore, the first that meets the methodological standards of experimental economics and finds evidence consistent with the presence of reward bundling.
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    The South African government, the pharmaceutical companies and access to HIV
    (2001) Cleary, Susan; Hodge, James; Ross, Don
    Bibliography: leaves 67-82.
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    Stochastic models in experimental economics
    (2018) Monroe, Brian Albert; Harrison, Glenn W; Ross, Don
    Shortly after the introduction of Expected Utility Theory (EUT), economists and psychologists began publishing results that showed choices made by experimental subjects which apparently violate one or more of the EUT axioms. I discuss economists' responses to this evidence. These vary from developing new theoretical models, models that nest EUT as a special case, such as Rank Dependent Utility (RDU) and Regret Theory, as well as models that do not nest EUT, such as Cumulative Prospect Theory, to critiques of experimental methods and scope, to the promotion of stochastic models of choice. I discuss popular stochastic choice models in depth and evaluate their normative coherence. I find that the "Random Preferences" stochastic model fails to make normatively coherent statements, in contrast to the "Random Error" and "Tremble" models, which do so. I demonstrate a method to calculate the unconditional likelihood of choice errors for populations of EUT-compliant and RDU-compliant agents, and show how certain characteristics of the population relate to the likelihood of these choice errors and their costliness in terms of forgone welfare. I find that elements of the stochastic model that are not related to preference relations tend to have a greater influence on unconditional welfare estimates than the preference parameters themselves. Finally, I conduct a power analysis of the ability of a lottery battery instrument to correctly classify experimental subjects as employing either EUT or RDU, and the effect of this classification on the accuracy of the estimates of welfare surplus for the subjects. For large ranges of parameter values for these models, I find that the probability of type I and type II errors in the classification process are not trivial, and can be very costly in terms of welfare surplus. Additionally, I show that for a hypothetical population comprising subjects employing EUT or RDU, we can arrive at more accurate welfare surplus estimates on average by assuming that every subject employs the RDU functional, rather than by first trying to differentiate RDU subjects from EUT subjects.
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    Techniques for general modelling of innovation strategies in entrant-incumbent scenarios
    (2003) Wolf, Guy Daniel; Ross, Don
    This thesis contributes to the literature in industrial organization economics on strategic behavior with respect to innovation. In particular, it seeks to extend the applicability of conclusions drawn from a Nash Equilibrium framework in response to the criticisms of Sutton (1991, 1998) through the use of sensitivity analysis. In addition, the focus of the investigation is the link between innovation and persistence of monopoly. The work of Gilbert & Newbery (1982) is used as a foundation for building a new analytical framework for application to innovation games in the traditional 'incumbent-entrant' scenario, but in the absence of the usual restrictive patenting assumption. The analysis of this framework is achieved by justifying an axiomatic definition of the pay-offs to players in various games and then using a computer software program to generate the Nash Equilibrium solution for many hundreds of scenarios. The sensitivity of the N.E. solution to changes in model parameters can then be ascertained. The general conclusion drawn from this approach is that the findings of much of the literature hold only under certain highly restrictive conditions. The investigation shows that barriers to entry are of far more relevance to the identity of the innovator than the characteristics of competition in the market once entry is achieved. It is also demonstrated that the incumbent is more likely to innovate first in an industry that demonstrates a systematically high level of growth. Scenarios of particular unintended risk to social welfare through regulatory attempts at stimulating competition are also identified.
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    Two petro-states diverge: explaining the institutional evolution of Nigeria and Angola
    (2019) Harvey, Ross; Ross, Don; Levy, Brian
    It is well-established that oil wealth in weakly institutionalised states tends to undermine development instead of catalysing it. Cross-country regressions, however, struggle to explain why comparably oil-wealthy countries such as Nigeria and Angola experience different political and economic outcomes over time. This thesis explains these differing outcomes through a theoretical lens derived from the New Institutional Economics and Political Settlements literature. Methodologically, it employs analytic narrative - the application of a game theoretic model to a historical puzzle to produce a thin explanation - and treats economic transactions as the key unit of analysis for understanding why particular outcomes obtain and not others. As a comparable site of analysis, I select the oil-for-infrastructure deals that were negotiated in Angola and Nigeria with Asian National Oil Companies between 2004 and 2007. Contrary to expectation, the deals were struck in Angola but failed in Nigeria. I hypothesise that the differential outcome reflects the varying quality of the institutional arrangements in each country for engaging foreign investors. This differential institutional quality resulted in differing commitment credibility over time, which partly accounts for deal failure in Nigeria. Divergent political economy trajectories and political settlements account for these differences. I use a game theory model that explains heterogeneity within authoritarian regimes to test these hypotheses. Application of the model to Angola and Nigeria respectively shows that Angolan dictator, José Eduardo dos Santos, was able to consolidate power within six years of becoming the head of state by successfully eliminating potential threats to his dictatorial ambitions. Under this closed, stable regime, foreign investors perceived greater levels of commitment credibility and struck deals. Nigeria’s uneven institutional evolution towards greater openness was punctuated by multiple successful coups and occasional civilian rule between long periods of military autocracy. The resultant instability undermined the perception of credibility, explaining why the deals failed. The thesis closes with a description of how Nigeria and Angola’s political economies have evolved since the oil-price crash of 2014, including how dos Santos unexpectedly lost power, and poses questions for future research.