Jennifer Kirstin Benz: A Framework for Understanding the Role of Self-Interest in Attitude Formation (Under the direction of Thomas Carsey) In this paper I present a framework based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion to explain the interplay of self-interest with symbolic beliefs and sociotropic perceptions in determining policy preferences. In developing the self-interest framew...

Large-lot exurban landscapes could incorporate ecological design in order to contribute ecosystem services. In our study, we use a survey of 126 Southeast Michigan homeowners to examine respondents’ stated preferences for residential yard images, and compare those with reported current use and management of their actual yards. We found that stated preferences are not necessarily related to actu...

Does globalization affect the demand-side of politics, and if so, how? This paper builds on new developments in trade theory to argue that globalization matters, but that its effects on individuals’ perceptions of labor market risk and policy preferences are more heterogenous than previous research has acknowledged. Globalization exposure increases risk perceptions and demands for social protec...

The major economic story of the last decade has been the surge and collapse of house prices worldwide. Yet political economists have had little to say about how this critical phenomenon affects citizens’ welfare and their demands from government. This article develops a novel theoretical argument linking housing prices to social policy preferences and policy outcomes. I argue that homeowners, p...

Human-robot collaboration presents an opportunity to improve the efficiency of manufacturing and assembly processes, particularly for aerospace manufacturing where tight integration and variability in the build process make physical isolation of robotic-only work challenging. In this paper, we develop a robotic scheduling and control capability that adapts to the changing preferences of a human...

The politics of economic crises bring distributive economic con‡ict to the fore of national political debates. How economic activity is to be regulated and how policy should be used to transfer resources between citizens become central political questions and the answers chosen often in‡uence the trajectory of policy for a generation or at least until the next crisis. This paper investigates ho...

We characterize the outcome of majority voting for single–peaked preferences on median spaces. This large class of preferences covers a variety of multi–dimensional policy spaces including products of lines (e.g. grids), trees, and hypercubes. Our main result is the following: If a Condorcet winner (i.e. a winner in pairwise majority voting) exists, then it coincides with the appropriately defi...

When an individual’s preferences depend on the time or ‘frame’ at which decisions are made, the preferences that appear at different frames must be aggregated in order to make social decisions. Suppose we aggregate each individual i’s frame-based preferences with a ‘behavioral welfare relation’ that ranks x above y if, when both x and y are available, i sometimes choose x and not y and never ch...

Recent health policy reforms try to increase consumer choice. We use a laboratory experiment to analyze consumers’ tastes in typical contract attributes of health insurances and to investigate their relationship with individual risk preferences. First, subjects make consecutive insurance choices varying in the number and types of contracts off ered. Then, we elicit individual risk preferences a...

Research on the housing choice voucher program and housing mobility interventions shows that even with assistance, it is difficult for poor minority families to relocate to, and remain in, low-poverty neighborhoods. Scholars suggest that both structural forces and individual preferences help explain these residential patterns. However, less attention is paid to where preferences come from, and ...