We would like to invite you to participate in Management Engineering (ME) Seminar.

1. When: June 4th(Mon) 14:00~15:30
2. Where: Supex Building, 3rd floor #301
3. Speaker: Prof. Euncheol Shin (Kyunghee Univ.)
4. Topic: [1] Do Teaching Practices Affect the Value of Friendship in School?
[2] Collective Environmental Policy Decisions and the Optimal Voting Rule
5. Research field: Green Business Policy/ Managerial Economics
* Lecture will be delivered in English.

[논문1]
Do Teaching Practices Affect the Value of Friendship in School?
(joint with Syngjoo Choi, Booyuel Kim, Eungik Lee, and Yoonsoo Park)

* Extended Abstract: There is recent growing empirical literature that has identified the influences of teaching practices on various social and economic outcomes such as asset accumulation, political participation, and trust (e.g., Algan et al., 2013; Bernheim and Garret, 2003). Specifically, Algan et al. (2013) found that the horizontal teaching method (such as organizing student groups and participating in a project with their group members) are associated with beliefs supporting the formation of social capital. With the collaboration of four coauthors, Syngjoo Choi (SNU), Booyuel Kim (KDI School), Eungik Lee (SNU), and Yoonsoo Park (KDI), I identify and measure effects of a horizontal teaching method on social preferences by analyzing noble socio-economic survey and controlled experimental result datasets. In the paper, we focus on the Project Based Learning (henceforth, PBL) method, and analyze its effect on students’ altruistic giving behavior and volunteer cooperation.

We gather survey and experimental data from 12 middle schools in the Republic of Korea. We divided the 12 schools into 6 treatment schools and 6 controlled schools. In the six treatment schools, after a series of teacher training programs, students learned through the PBL method for about three months; in contrast, in the six control schools, students learned through the regular teaching method. To measure the PBL effects, we collected data in August and December in 2016. Our data collection consisted of two stages. In the first stage, we conducted experimental dictator games and public goods games. Then, in the second stage, we collected a survey of individual characteristics of each of the students including gender, height, family backgrounds, shyness, etc. In addition to personal characteristics, we collected the in-school friendships through a standard survey technique.

The friendship survey plays an important role in our analysis. The PBL might influence on students' friendships due to their experience in the group activities. Since subjects' behavior in experiments depends on their relationships, we need to control for relationships between subjects in experiments. For this, we allowed student subjects to see the identity of partners. Benefitting from this experimental design, we can analyze subjects’ behavior as a function of their relationships. By controlling for subjects' relationships, our unique research design enables us to measure the PBL effect on giving and cooperation behaviors through a standard difference-in-differences (henceforth, DD) technique.

Several results emerge from the analysis of our data. First, we verify that both dictator offers and voluntary cooperation levels are explained by their relationship with matched partners. This relation-specific behavior remains after controlling for individual characteristics. In particular, even after controlling for giving amounts in dictator game experiments, the cooperation level is explained by subjects' relationships. A few characteristics such as gender and class-membership explain the dictators' giving amounts.

We then identify the effect of PBL method for three months by the DD analysis. We measure that in dictator game experiments, the dictators in the treatment schools offered 2.8 percent higher than the subjects in treatment schools. Then, we decompose the effect into subjects' relationships so as to identify the relationship from which the substantial increase originated. Surprisingly, we find that when the dictators in treatment schools offered 3.3 percent higher when neither the dictator nor the recipient identified the other in our friendship survey. Of course, the relation-specific PBL effect remains after controlling for other personal characteristics. Finally, contrary to the substantial increase of the giving the amount in dictator games, we find no statistically significant changes in subjects' behavior in public goods games.

[논문2]
Collective Environmental Policy Decisions and the Optimal Voting Rule
(joint with Duk Gyoo Kim)

* Abstract: Environmental policy decisions often involve a proofreading process before approval. I present a dynamic model of proofreading decisions by a heterogeneous committee, in which the committee decides whether to approve a risky policy or a safe policy. A proofreading process is costly and necessary because the risky project contains an unknown number of errors and is valuable only when all errors are corrected. The proofreading process continues as long as a qualified majority votes for continuation. Once the proofreading process ends, members decide whether to approve the risky policy or submit the alternative policy, which is also determined by a qualified majority rule. I find that the simple majority rule may result in an outcome that is not welfare-maximizing. Then, I show that a welfare-maximizing voting rule exists if different threshold numbers apply for the continuation and submission stages.