Kate Krause

We compare individual consumer response between ex ante market data collected by a water utility and ex post experimentally generated data. The experimentally generated data are matched to each participant's water bill history, which predates the experiment. This differentiates our research from prior efforts, which analyze market and experimental data with similar chronologies. For roughly 70% of the participants there is no statistical difference between water demand elasticities estimated using laboratory data and those estimated from market data. Our results provide initial support for the use of experimental procedures to generate missing data regarding hypothetical consumer response. (JEL C9, D12, Q25)

This study examines detailed data for faculty at a typical public research university in the United States between 1995 and 2004 to explore whether gender wage differentials can be explained by productivity differences. The level of detail – including the number of courses taught, enrollment, grant dollars, and number and impact of publications – largely eliminates the problem of unmeasured productivity, and the restriction to one firm eliminates unmeasured work conditions that confound investigations of wider labor markets. The authors find that direct productivity measures reduce the gender wage penalty to about 3 percent, only 1 percentage point lower than estimates from national studies of many institutions and with fewer productivity controls. The wage structure for women faculty differs markedly from the wage structure for men. Interpreted against the institutional features of wage setting for this population, the paper concludes that penalties for women arise at the department level.

We present an incentive model for route distribution in the context of path vector routing protocols and we focus on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP is the de-facto protocol for interdomain routing on the Internet. We model BGP route distribution and computation using a game in which a BGP speaker advertises its prefix to its direct neighbors promising them a reward for further distributing the route deeper into the network, the neighbors do the same thing with their neighbors, and so on. The result of this cascaded route distribution is an advertised prefix and hence reachability of the BGP speaker. We first study the convergence of BGP protocol dynamics to a unique outcome tree in the defined game. We then proceed to study the existence of equilibria in the full information game considering competition dynamics. We focus our work on the simplest two classes of graphs: 1) the line (and the tree) graphs which involve no competition, and 2) the ring graph which involves competition.