Parental gender preferences may affect partnership decisions and as a result lead to early life disadvantages. We study these in five post-communist countries of Central Eastern Europe, region with strong traditional norms persisting inequalities between women men labour market outcomes. Using subsamples census from Belarus, Hungary, Poland, Romania Russia around 2000 2010, we follow Dahl Moret...

We consider cheap talk by a biased expert comparing multiple issues, e.g., discussion of different spending proposals by an industry lobbyist, evaluation of different stocks by a sell-side analyst, or analysis of different topics by a biased newspaper. When the expert’s motives are sufficiently transparent, we find that cheap talk is credible and influential even when the expert strongly favors...

In this paper, we introduce a notion of epistemic equivalence between hierarchies of conditional beliefs and hierarchies of lexicographic beliefs, thus extending the standard equivalence results of Halpern (2010) and Brandenburger et al. (2007) to an interactive setting, and we show that there is a Borel surjective function, mapping each conditional belief hierarchy to its epistemically equival...

We study the problem of elicitation of subjective beliefs of an agent when the beliefs are ambiguous (the set of beliefs is a non-singleton set) and the agent’s preference exhibits ambiguity aversion; in particular, as represented by α-maxmin preferences. We construct a direct revelation mechanism such that truthful reporting of beliefs is the agent’s unique best response. The mechanism uses kn...

This paper examines the nature of partisan preferences on a range of issue scales. It compares preferences in a period of strong ideological focus, in the late eighties and early nineties, with preferences in 2000 and 2001 – a period of weak ideological focus. Where partisan preferences were formerly polarised, they are now more consensual. I argue that once positional issues now resemble valen...

This chapter reviews previous work on an evolutionary model describing the effect of time delays on human preferences. The model explains why the long-term real interest rate is usually near 3% and why rates of crime and driving accidents are highest among young adults. It does not succeed in explaining the phenomenon of preference reversal. The chapter reports new results on uncertainty and on...

Extending recent research on parental gender preferences in the Nordic countries, this study uses unique register data from Finland and Sweden (1971-1999) that provide us with the opportunity to compare childbearing dynamics and possible underlying sex preferences among native majorities and national minorities, namely Finnish-born immigrants in Sweden and members of the Swedish-speaking minori...

Discussions about the evolution of female mating preferences have often suggested that females should express multiple strong preferences when different male traits are correlated with different mating benefits, yet few studies have directly tested this hypothesis by comparing the strength of female preferences for male traits known to be correlated with different benefits. In the variable fiel...

Article history: Received 23 September 2015 Received in revised form 23 January 2016 Accepted 30 January 2016 Available online xxxx Mate preferences provide unique windows into evolved mating psychology and extant cultural values. The current study used two research instruments—one ranking and one rating—to examine mate preferences in Brazil. We compared modern Brazilians (n = 1186) with a Braz...

Historically, son preference has been widely prevalent in South Asia, manifested the form of skewed sex ratios, gender differentials child mortality, and worse educational investments daughters versus sons. In present study, we show, using data from a purposefully designed nationally representative survey for Bangladesh, that among women childbearing age, bias stated fertility preferences weake...