Search results for "Finite mixture models"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
The many faces of human sociality: uncovering the distribution and stability of social preferences
2018
There is vast heterogeneity in the human willingness to weigh others' interests in decision making. This heterogeneity concerns the motivational intricacies as well as the strength of other-regarding behaviors, and raises the question how one can parsimoniously model and characterize heterogeneity across several dimensions of social preferences while still being able to predict behavior over time and across situations. We tackle this task with an experiment and a structural model of preferences that allows us to simultaneously estimate outcome-based and reciprocity-based social preferences. We find that non-selfish preferences are the rule rather than the exception. Neither at the level of …
Evolution of the Global Distribution of Carbon Dioxide: A Finite Mixture Analysis
2015
Economists and environmental policymakers have recently begun advocating a bottom-up approach to climate change mitigation, focusing on reduction targets for groups of nations, rather than large scale global policies. We advance this discussion by taking a quantitative perspective, focusing on econometric identification of groups of countries that have statistically similar distributions of carbon emissions using a broad range of finite mixture models. Nearly all of our results yield a consistent pattern: after 1980, there are two distinct emissions distributions, and that these distributions continue to evolve over time. We provide a rigorous analysis of these distributional differences al…
Incentive and Selection Effects of Medigap Insurance on Inpatient Care
2012
The Medicare program, which provides insurance coverage to the elderly in the United States, does not protect them fully against high out-of-pocket costs. For this reason private supplementary insurance, named Medigap, has been available to cover Medicare gaps. This paper studies how Medigap affects the utilization of inpatient care, separating the incentive and selection effects of supplementary insurance. For this purpose, we use two alternative estimation methods: a standard recursive bivariate probit and a discrete multivariate finite mixture model. We find that estimated incentive effects are modest and quite similar across models. On the other hand, there seems to be very significant …
Ranking Scientific Journals Via Latent Class Models for Polytomous Item Response Data
2015
Summary We propose a model-based strategy for ranking scientific journals starting from a set of observed bibliometric indicators that represent imperfect measures of the unobserved ‘value’ of a journal. After discretizing the available indicators, we estimate an extended latent class model for polytomous item response data and use the estimated model to cluster journals. We illustrate our approach by using the data from the Italian research evaluation exercise that was carried out for the period 2004–2010, focusing on the set of journals that are considered relevant for the subarea statistics and financial mathematics. Using four bibliometric indicators (IF, IF5, AIS and the h-index), some…