世新大學圖書館

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-08, Section: A, page: 3107.

Supervisors: Maxwell B. Stinchcombe; R. Preston McAfee.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Texas at Austin, 2004.

The economics of privacy: Big Brother v. the Fourth Amendment . In this paper, the Fourth Amendment is viewed as reducing the conviction probability when the police search a suspect without probable cause. The effect of the Fourth Amendment on social welfare is examined in a strategic model where crime and police search are endogenous. In some parameter ranges, the Fourth Amendment actually increases the police's search intensity, and has an ambiguous effect on crime and wrongful searches. However, in the other relevant parameter ranges, it reduces the police's search intensity, increases crime, and reduces wrongful searches. Moreover, the Fourth Amendment and a strong form of police accountability are jointly sufficient for ongoing progress in search technology to ultimately lead to a Utopian equilibrium in which the police never search without probable cause and most citizens do not commit crime.

An economic theory of the Fifth Amendment. The Fifth Amendment's due process clause requires the prosecution to share evidence with the defense, and its right to silence blocks the jury from drawing an adverse inference from the defendant's silence during trial. I examine the effect of the right to silence and the disclosure requirement on conviction rates and welfare in a model of criminal trials. Mandatory disclosure by the prosecution has an ambiguous effect on the conviction rate without the right to silence, but reduces it with the right to silence. The right to silence always reduces the conviction rate. Its effect on welfare, if welfare is based on the principle that a wrongful conviction is worse than a wrongful acquittal, depends on whether the jury's preferences are biased relative to those of society, the reputations of the police (which is connected to the Fourth Amendment in the long run), and the difficulty of the case. Moreover, mandatory disclosure reduces the efficiency of the right to silence for all parameters.

A jury may infer from a suspect's silence that he is guilty, but may also infer from his statement that he is lying. Silence and lies are two important aspects of spoken language. My study of language continues as I shift focus to lies.

The economics of ecstasy. This paper models love-making as a signaling game. In the act of love-making, man and woman send each other possibly deceptive signals about their true state of ecstasy. Each has a prior belief about the other's state of ecstasy. These prior beliefs are associated with the other's sexual response capacity, which varies in different ways for men and women over the life-cycle. The model predicts that love, formally defined as a mixture of altruism and possessiveness, increases the probability of faking ecstasy, but more so for women than for men, and age has a greater effect on the probability of faking if the partners are in love than if they are not. These predictions are tested with data from the 2000 Orgasm Survey. Besides supporting the predictions, the data also reveal a positive relationship between education and the tendency to fake. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

School code: 0227.