In recent years Additive Manufacturing (also known as 3D printing) processes have risen in use within research and industry to create complex, custom parts, which would be otherwise too expensive or even impossible to fabricate via conventional manufacturing methods. While originated as a tool for rapid prototyping, the improvements in...
This study is a response to the observation that people articulate meanings of rules in flexible and context-specific ways, but that literature on international legal, norm-based, strategic-logical, and ethical/moral rules typically treats them as pregiven, stable objects. By examining people’s evolving justifications of practices related to firefighting (protecting against and...
This thesis explores questions in labor economics and applied microeconomics, with particular focus on issues that have implications for public policy. The first essay estimates the Frisch elasticity, sometimes known as the wage elasticity of labor supply in response to anticipated wage changes. Despite its importance in macroeconomic and public...
This dissertation presents research on the game theory of political power, both between and within nations. It first revisits a classical distinction between three different types of power or influence: information, rewards and threats. By presenting a binary-action Principal-Agent problem which incorporates the essential ingredients of all three types of...
This dissertation investigates the relationship between melancholy and the development of American and Iranian literary discourses as responses to the crisis of postwar sovereignty. While situating itself against the complicated backdrop of US/Iran relations since the Second World War, it explores the impact of religion on the formation of political...
Automobile transportation is among the leading sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and reducing vehicle miles traveled must be part of our climate change mitigation efforts. One recent trend that, if accelerated, could aid in this effort is the increase in bicycling for transportation in large US...
Fibrosis is a chronic pathology which commonly develops after chronic inflammation. Different specific kinds of inflammation have been linked to fibrosis across various tissues. When specifically occurring in the prostate, fibrosis can lead to urinary dysfunction. Prostate conditions that involve inflammation have also been linked to both prostate fibrosis and...
Digitization has led to dramatic cost reductions and reshaped both what and how products are sold. This dissertation examines the impact of digitization on the behavior of market intermediaries that bring together producers and consumers. Our empirical context is the transition from 35mm film to digital cinema technologies in the...
This project centers set design as the primary aesthetic, economic, and sociopolitical driver of the sitcom genre’s emergence and development during the first half of the twentieth century. My work treats sitcom set design as a category of historical architecture that can be (and has been) mapped, toured, built, and...
This dissertation is on daily policing dynamics in China, centering around one core question: why coercive institutions can be extremely efficient for some issues but nearly dysfunctional for others in authoritarian regimes. The police may enforce the law relentlessly in some cases, even if there is no clear harm, but...