UAA College of Business and Public Policy

11th Annual Sophist Salmon Debate

Commerce Unbound: A Modern Promethean Story

Friday, March 31, 2017 3:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m., RH 117 Presentation by: Jan Osborn Assistant Professor, Chapman University Department of English Commerce Unbound: A Modern Promethean Story is an experiment with integrating economics and ethics in a form that could be described as literary-critical economic nonfiction. By mapping the modern world of commerce into our interpretation of Percy Shelley's “Prometheus Unbound,” we revivify bourgeois life as Shelley revivifies the Promethean story with his own take on the myth. In doing so we make Shelley’s purpose our own, “to familiarize” our audience “with beautiful ideal-isms of moral excellence” in their everyday lives of commerce. Shelley’s point and ours is that any socioeconomic revolution, whether from the left or the right, will ultimately fail if it is fomented by despair, anger, and hate.

What is Management About?

Term Assistant Professor of Management Bob Poe explains what the subject is all about.

Marie Claire Villeval Seminar : Loss Aversion and Lying Behavior

Marie Claire Villeval, University of Lyon, will be hosting a seminar on her paper "Loss Aversion and Lying Behavior: Theory, Estimation, and Empirical Evidence", co-authored with Ellen Gabrino and Robert Slonim. From the paper's abstract: We theoretically show that loss averse agents facing a decision to receive a bad financial payoff if they report honestly or a better financial payoff if they report dishonestly are more likely to lie the lower the ex-ante probability of the bad outcome. This occurs due to the ex-ante expected payoff increasing as the bad outcome becomes less likely, and hence the greater the loss that can be avoided by lying. We demonstrate robust support for this role of loss aversion on lying by reanalyzing the results from the extant literature covering 74 studies and 363 treatments, and from two new experiments that vary the outcome probabilities and examine lying for personal gain and for gains to causes one supports or opposes. To measure and compare lying behavior across treatments and studies, we develop an empirical method that estimates the full distribution of dishonesty when agents privately observe the outcome of a random process and can misreport what they observed.

ANCSA: Land, Spirit and Identity

Be sure to join us Friday February 10, 2017 from 6:30 to 9:30 PM in Rasmuson Hall room 101 for "ANCSA: Land, Spirit and Identity". Guests include Byron Mallott, Emil Notti, Willie Hensley and special moderator, Gerad Godfrey. They will share their perspective on whether the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act preserves the Alaska Native values of land, spirit and identity. The event is free and open to the public.