Though Mass Open Online Courses are very different from each other in their structure, content or audience, they are all characterized by low completion rates. In this paper, we use the Cox proportional hazard model to analyze student retention in the MOOC Principle of Microeconomics. Using two...

Consider two random variables X and Y. In initial probability and statistics courses, a discussion of various concepts of dissociation between X and Y is customary. These concepts typically involve independence and uncorrelatedness. An example is shown where E(Y^n|X) = E(Y^n) and E(X^n|Y) =...

We propose a model of history-dependent risk attitude, allowing a decision maker’s risk attitude to be affected by his history of disappointments and elations. The decision maker recursively evaluates compound risks, classifying realizations as disappointing or elating using a threshold rule....

Social norms are often posited as an explanation of differences in economic behavior and performance of societies that are difficult to explain by differences in endowments and technology. Economists are often reluctant to incorporate social aspects into their analyses when doing so leads to...

We show that for a disappointment-averse decision maker, splitting a lottery into several stages reduces its value. To do this, we extend Gul.s (1991) model of disappointment aversion into a dynamic setting while keeping its basic characteristics intact. The result depends solely on the sign of...

Consider an agent who is unsure of the state of the world and faces computational bounds on mental processing. The agent receives a sequence of signals imperfectly correlated with the true state that he will use to take a single decision. The agent is assumed to have a finite number of "states...

We propose a model of history-dependent risk attitude (HDRA), allowing the attitude of a decision-maker (DM) towards risk at each stage of a T-stage lottery to evolve as a function of his history of disappointments and elations in prior stages. We establish an equivalence between the existence...

We propose a model of history dependent disappointment aversion (HDDA), allowing the attitude of a decision-maker (DM) towards disappointment at each stage of a T-stage lottery to evolve as a function of his history of disappointments and elations in prior stages. We establish an equivalence...

We examine markets in which agents make investments and then match into pairs, creating surpluses that depend on their investments and that can be split between the matched agents. In general, each of the matched agents would ”own" part of the surplus in the absence of interagent transfers....

We study students' dropout behavior and its consequences in a dynamic signaling model. Workers pay an education cost per unit of time and cannot commit to a fixed education length. Workers face an exogenous dropout risk before graduation. Since low-productivity students' cost is high, pooling...