A look at the similarities and differences in the the work of Latino artists from different regions reflecting their influences and their shared struggles. This work compares and contrasts the work of Paul Sierra of Cuba, Carlos Almaraz of Mexico and Alex Rubino of the United States to illustrate the similarities and differences these three artists, commonly identified as Latino, show in their work.

Children separated from a parent or parents, especially from military families, deal with various emotional and social issues such as separation anxiety and learning difficulties. Although current technologies allow for communication over great distances, these methods often fall short or are difficult to use, especially for young children. One way to help alleviate these issues is through communication with the separated parent. “The formation of secure attachments with significant adults is critical for sound development during the early years and forms a secure foundation that impacts future development across the life span. All areas are interrelated, thus when children thrive socially…and emotionally…they usually thrive physically…and cognitively. Thus it is helpful if both parents are a part of the early stages of development.” (“U.S. Army Deployment Support Handbook: Children and Youth” 37) By developing an interactive toy that allows for communication between the separated parent and the child, the child will be more able to communicate and play in a meaningful manner with the separated parent and thus enrich their development and relationship. This will allow for a more psychologically sound and confident child resulting in reduced trauma for both child and parent.

How firms make their pricing decisions is a fundamental question of macroeconomics. We use a laboratory experiment to examine individual choices in a price updating task that provide insight into how well state dependent models reflect behavior. We find that in general subjects behave as if they recognize the importance of a state dependent pricing strategy, but they are unable to ascertain this threshold with precision and they also exhibit a substantial degree of time dependence. As a result, they update prices too frequently, and perform statistically significantly fewer real effort profit-generating tasks than theoretically optimal under full state dependence, which results in statistically significantly lower profits as well.

It is notoriously hard to study the effect of alcohol on decision making, given the selection that takes place in who drinks alcohol and when they choose to do so. In a controlled laboratory experiment, we study the causal effect of alcohol on economic decision making. We examine the impact of alcohol on the following types of tasks: math and logic, uncertainty, overconfidence, strategic games, food choices, anchoring, and altruism. Our results indicate that alcohol consumption, as measured by the blood alcohol concentration (BAC), increases cooperation in strategic settings and altruism in Dictator games. We do not find any effects of alcohol on individual decision making tasks with the exception of anchoring. People with higher BAC did better in the anchoring task. The results suggest that the effects of alcohol are domain specific.

This dissertation uses experimental evidence to explore the effects of overconfidence on economic decision making. In Chapter 1 I provide experimental evidence of the effects of alcohol on overconfidence and several other important tasks. I also explore the relationship between overconfidence and the behavior in the other tasks. The data from this experiment show that an alcohol level of 0.08 does not have a systemic effect on behavior and more importantly it does not affect ones level of overconfidence. I also show that overconfidence is not significantly correlated with risk preferences, math, strategic behavior, anchoring, altruism, and food choices. In Chapter 2 I use feedback to establish a causal link between overconfidence and trading behavior. Feedback is used to eliminate the possibility for subjects to be overconfident about the accuracy of their signals. The data from this experiment show that overconfidence affects trading volume and profits, but when feedback is provide...