Experimental Methods: A Primer for Economists

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Terrific Introduction to Game Theory Experiments

Experimental Methods: A Primer for Economists
Daniel Friedman , and Shyam Sunder
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0521456827

Book Description

Experimental economics is a rapidly growing field of inquiry, and there currently exist several textbooks and surveys describing the results of laboratory experiments in economics. This primer, however, is the first hands-on guide to the physical aspects of actually conducting experiments in economics. It tells researchers, teachers and students in economics how to deal with human subjects, how to design meaningful laboratory environments, how to design experiments, how to conduct the experiments, and how to analyze and report the data. It also deals with methodological issues. It can be used to structure an undergraduate or graduate course in experimental economics.

Customer Reviews:

Terrific Introduction to Game Theory Experiments.......2000-12-20

I recently used this book in an introductory course in experimental methods in political science, taught at Columbia University. (I used the book in a seminar for juniors but it would also be appropriate for first year graduate students.) The book was recommended to me by a leading experimentalist in political science, and its easy to see why. It is filled with practical suggestions, on everything from recruiting subjects, to writing instructions, to analyzing data. It's many references to the literature (as well as sample syllabi) are very helpful. It is also short and readable, and reasonably priced. One caveat: if you are more interested in the psychology tradition to laboratory experiments, there are more appropriate books. Also, it does not deal with field experiments. But if you are interested in the game theoretic/economic tradition of laboratory experiments, it is hard to beat as a practical introduction. In short, a terrific book. Charles Cameron Associate Professor of Political Science Columbia University

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A broad range of international contributors assess the impact of the World Bank on the modern world. Topics covered include: structural adjustment in Africa,the history of the Bank, development projects, cross-cultural coalitions, and the politics of the World Bank.

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"Many people have sex in mind a great deal of the time." Authors Malcolm Potts and Roger Short spent more than 15 years trying to understand and explain these passions. While not fully embracing biological determinism--that destiny is simply written in the genes--Potts and Short believe that evolutionary biology can help explain human behavior. In this book they focus on milestones in life's cycle, such as love, marriage, sex, pregnancy, birth, parenting, divorce, and death. Each of these complex behaviors is studied in turn and analyzed for its biological foundations and centuries of cultural modifications. Nearly 100 illustrations lend support to the authors' theories, and dozens of fascinating sidebars go into greater depth about everything from Siamese twins and cloning to wet-nursing and Viagra.

The book is not without its flaws: the authors' belief that most behaviors are biologically based leads them to make sexist conclusions at times--for example, they argue that a woman's interest in sports must primarily stem from a desire to please her man. They also maintain that evolutionary biology can suggest solutions to some of our most difficult problems, without suggesting what these solutions (or, indeed, problems) may be. That said, the authors do an excellent job of teasing out the twisted strands of nature and nurture that make us who we are. Though scholars may find the lack of footnotes frustrating, Ever Since Adam and Eve will pique the interest of educated readers. --C.B. Delaney

Book Description

Eminent scientists Malcolm Potts and Roger Short view the broad panorama of human sexual and reproductive behaviour to reveal an inextricable mixture of nature and nurture - a combination of innate actions which have evolved over the millennia to adapt us to a nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle, overlain by more recent cultural constraints imposed by civilization. For each of life’s milestones - sexual intercourse, conception, pregnancy, birth, puberty, love, marriage, parenting, menopause and death - they describe the biology behind our actions and consider how pressures imposed by various historical and contemporary cultures have further influenced our behaviour. By looking back at the past they attempt to make sense of the present, to see how and why these cultural modifications arose, how they have contributed to the richness of human sexual behaviour, and what our biological and cultural inheritance can teach us about safeguarding the continuation of our species.

Customer Reviews:

Ever Since Adam and Eve.......2000-03-20

This book is a MUST for anyone who considers themselves an unbiassed thinker. If only there were a text like this when I was in college. It will appeal to anyone interested in anthropology, sociology and/or zoology. You don't have to agree with the arguments of the authors as they are the flavour enhancers of the proverbial "food for thought". The beauty of this book is it's personal affect of invading your waking and sleeping hours with questions. Wonderfully stimulating, the best thing I have read in AGES. What a legacy.

A great Outlook on sexual inhabitions and what drives them!.......1999-08-26

This book was written by my uncle who has always been an inspiration in my life. This book is just another extension of his Greatness! Malcolm Potts takes his work very seriously. I know that this book will and has already made changes in my life as far as human sexuality goes. It will make me take my sexual desires and actions to a new and much safer level.

veryprovacative,justone of thosebooksthathasrealityalloverit.......1999-08-03

the book was very touching.it made feel as if iwas far away from God, and it made me realize how far my relationship with God really was, and i'm just glad that Malcolm Potts and Roger Short brought me back to reality...

Stunning summary of the human condition from then to now.......1999-07-13

Of course there is nothing new under the sun...or is there? Better read this often funny, frequently irreverent book with remarkable sexual pictures and graphics. New syntheses must draw on past information. Like any masterpiece, these authors took lifetimes to acquire and understand the knowledge they now offer us in this complex, yet easy to read scientific recitation of human and other sexual histories. The book tells you about our evolutionary hsitory, that we are indeed descended from earlier animals and even earlier forms of life. They document that the main evolutionary drive for humans and mammals generally has been and is SEX, for the key to our existence is the need to produce the BEST next generation. For many this book will prove an epiphany of understanding, a creation of more reverence for life, but one not based on the mythology of religion, but on the clear facts of science. Don't miss it.

well written cultural anthroplogy.......1999-05-24

Two internationally recognized authors have provided us with a sparkling volume; informative and engaging. Several lay friends have read my copy, and shared it with their families.

Ever Since Adam and Eve: The Evolution of Human Sexuality.(Review) : An article from: American Scientist

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Ever Since Adam and Eve: The Evolution of Human Sexuality.(Review) : An article from: American Scientist

Manufacturer: Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

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The Evolution of Human Sexuality.(Review) (book review): An article from: Human Biology

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The Evolution of Human Sexuality.(Review) (book review): An article from: Human Biology
Paul E. Simonds
Manufacturer: Wayne State University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

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Book Description

This digital document is an article from Human Biology, published by Wayne State University Press on October 1, 2000. The length of the article is 944 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The Evolution of Human Sexuality.(Review) (book review)
Author: Paul E. Simonds
Publication: Human Biology (Refereed)
Date: October 1, 2000
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Volume: 72 Issue: 5 Page: 901

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Book Description

Award-winning literary journalist Chip Brown tells the story of the life and death of a brilliant, complicated man-an outdoorsman with a troubled soul, a pioneer of the New England wilderness, who sought rebirth in nature only to end his own life on a snowy mountaintop in a gesture of chilling premeditation.

Guy Waterman checked out of his former life as a Capitol Hill speechwriter and father of three at midlife to pursue the passion that promised to deliver him from his demons: mountain climbing. Along with his second wife, he built a cabin nestled in the mountains of Vermont, without modern conveniences of any kind, in order to live purely on the land and for the land, and thereby to redefine himself in the extremes of frontier life. An accomplished jazz pianist who could recite hours of poetry, a genuine eccentric beloved by many, Waterman became the dean of the homesteading movement and the foremost historian of the mountains of the northeast. So when he methodically carried out his mountain suicide, those who loved him were left to wonder whether it was the action of a noble man, painfully aware of the encroachments of age and determined to die with dignity, or that of a tragic figure doomed by the code of the Hard Man-a man who could not find the strength to be weak and forgive his own limitations.

Chip Brown writes with exhilarating clarity about the thrill of mountain climbing and with compassion and intelligence about the mystery that begins when a life ends. Good Morning Midnight is a gripping story of survival in nature, with an existential heart.

Customer Reviews:

Good Morning Midnight.......2006-03-21

Great book, I was touched by Chip's thoughtful writting of such a wonderful, but sad, life and death. It is so sad that friends and family allowed these men to suffer through depression without finding a way to getting them help. It's a message to all of us to help those who can not help themselves.

The Tragic Story of A New England Legend.......2006-03-18

This is a powerful book. Mr. Brown examines the life of Guy Waterman, a man who became the personification of the Old Man Of The Mountain. Guy was an amzing man who workedin fields ranging from speech writing in Washington, to jazz pianist, to winter caretaker of an AMC hut.

There is no hero-worship here. The book examines Guy's dark side as well; his early divorce, chronic depression, the deaths of his two sons, and his eventual suicide.

A well-penned epilogue.......2004-04-25

This very artfully told tale was truly page turner for me. Thick with literary references, Brown's story of Guy Waterman reflects the complexity of a multi-talented individual, appreciated by many, but omniouly least of all by himself.

I came away with a very strong feeling that Guy Waterman was truly a unique individual. His successes far outweighed his failures. But his ultimate failure was to recognize that hardmen mature into wisemen. Old Men of the Mountain types, who regale their friends and cohorts with lessons and values of challenging and living amongst the mountains. No matter how far flung the challenge, a mountaineer's ultimate objective is to return from his/her adventure to share the experience; the cold, the hard breathing, the colors, the wind and their intimate feelings of wonder or survival. Regretfully, Guy's inner-self, his demons, contested his own outwardly generous, steadfast and friendly personality.

For me, Brown's story reacquainted me with several names and places familiar in mountaineering circles. It also cleard my long held confusion between John Waterman the highly acclaimed, albeit daring alpinist, Guy's son and Jonathan Waterman the prolific author of Alaskan mountaineering.

HOWEVER, as an end note the publisher editorial and Author INCORRECTLY stated that Krakauer wrote about John Waterman. The book Into the Wild was the story of Chris McCandless, by J.Krakauer.

A beautiful glimmer of a man's interesting life.......2004-02-13

After just finishing the book I found myself wanting to write the author and thank him for letting the reader into another world, a very personal one, of a man who had experienced so much in the ways of life, love, and death. The book flows with it's constant references to Guy Waterman's own writings as well as great literary works. I felt a part of the waterman clan ,without intruding, after reading the book. It has been a long time since a book made anything so real with out being too heavy handed. The adventures are amazing, both in the outdoors and with the human emotions. A fantastically orchestrated work; Chip Brown has proved himself as an outdoorsman and writer.

Total disappointment.......2004-02-03

I can only hope that Guy Waterman's final freezing hours atop Mt. Lafayette were less painful than trying to get through this book.

If there's a good story in here somewhere, it will take a search and rescue party to find it among Mr. Brown's endless rambling and superflous language. Here's an example, lifted randomly from the third chapter: "Although the Farm was only eight miles from downtown New Haven, where Professor Waterman taught physics at Yale, it seemed a world apart, a kind of Connecticut Shangri-la exempt from the privations of the Great Depression and far from the portents of the Second World War, and impossible, really, to separate from the enchantment of childhood itself, part place, part time, part the memory of that theater of spirits where Mother is forever calling you home from the woods with a silver whistle and Father is ushering you to bed with a lullaby on the grand piano."

Despite his impressive credentials, Brown writes like a novice who is more concerned with constructing elaborate sentences and displaying vocabulary than capturing the reader's interest and telling the subject's story. Shame on this book's editor for not hacking it to shreds.

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In November of 1996, Andrew Sullivan wrote an article in the New York Times Magazine entitled "When Plagues End" in which he claimed that then-new treatments for the HIV retrovirus had signaled the end of AIDS. The article drew much criticism from activists and health professionals; in Love Undetectable, Sullivan--who is himself living with HIV--elaborates upon his argument, embellishing and embroidering it with nuance and context to make it at once more personal and universal. His thinking about AIDS leads him to a philosophical contemplation on the "causes" of homosexuality in which he discards all of the negative psychological theories, then rejects genetics as well. In the following essay on the nature of friendship and love, Sullivan finds his voice and true topic--using "friendship" as a lens through which he can wed his autobiographical musings and speculative theories on how we, as mortal humans struggling against time and the body, can make sense of the world.

Always provocative--the chapters on the plague will still rankle those who see AIDS as an ever-present and growing danger--Love Undetectable proves that Sullivan has a voice and a heart that can reach across the borders of experience and politics. --Michael Bronski

Book Description

"I intend to be among the first generation that survives this disease." That was former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan's first public statement about his HIV diagnosis. Speaking to heterosexual and homosexual audiences alike, this book is about the first steps in that journey of survival.

If Sullivan's acclaimed first book, Virtually Normal, was about politics, this long-awaited sequel is about life. In a memoir in the form of three essays, Sullivan asks hard questions about his own life and others'. Can the practice of friendship ever compensate for a life without love? Is sex at war or at peace with spirituality? Can faith endure the randomness of death? Is homosexuality genetic or environmental?

Love Undetectable, then, refers to many things: to a virus that, for many, has become "undetectable" in the bloodstream thanks to new drugs, and to the failed search for love and intimacy that helped spread it; to the love of God, which in times of plague seems particularly hard to find and understand; to a sexual orientation long pathologized and denied any status as an equal form of human love; and to the love between friends, a love ignored when it isn't demeaned, and obscured by the more useful imperatives of family and society.

In a work destined to be as controversial as his first book, Sullivan takes on religious authorities and gay activists; talks candidly about his own promiscuity and search for love; revisits Freud in the origins of homosexuality; and makes one of the more memorable modern cases for elevating the virtue of friendship over the satisfactions of love. Scholarly, impassioned, wide-ranging, and embattled, Love Undetectable is a book that is ultimately not about homosexuality or plague, but about humanity and mortality.

Customer Reviews:

Notes from the life of a survivor.......2003-07-22

Andrew Sullivan made a reputation for himself by being elevated at a very young age as a senior editor of 'The New Republic', a position he filled from 1991-1996. He continues his journalistic career by writing for 'The Times' (London) and 'New York Times Magazine', as well as contributing articles to a large number of other periodicals.

At the height of his career, Sullivan made the announcement made the announcement that he was HIV-positive. In saying this, he made the assertion: `I intend to be among the first generation that survives this disease.'

Sullivan has occupied a difficult position politically - tending toward conservatism that doesn't sit well with much of the homosexual community, he also tends toward political positions (such as pro-same sex marriage) that go against much of the conservative sentiment. In this first book, 'Virtually Normal', Sullivan argued for an acceptance of same-sex marriage; he followed that up by editing a collection of essays and contributions by others on the same topic.

However, his latest book, 'Love Undetectable', is a very different book. Insofar as Sullivan's life is inextricably bound up with political, historical, and sociological writing through his profession, that is reflected here, but this is a very non-political book. Consisting of three essays, it is primarily reflexions on the life of a survivor, who has yet to become a successful survivor - Sullivan himself.

Sullivan is bound to alienate all sides in some ways once again with this volume. He takes on both the church and religious side and the gay liberation side in his first essay: When Plagues End. 'The gay liberationists have plenty to answer for in this. For far too long, they promoted the tragic lie that no avenue of sexuality was any better or nobler than any other; that all demands for responsibility or fidelity or commitment or even healthier psychological integration were mere covers for "neoconservatism" or, worse, "self-hatred"; that even in the teeth of a viral catastrophe, saving lives was less important than saving a culture of `promiscuity as a collective way of life', when, of course, it was little more than a collective way of death.'

Of course, this quotation is bound to please the fundamentalists, who would love to paint the gay community as a `collective way of death'. But Sullivan doesn't go lightly on the other side, either. Sullivan recalls a time when the AIDS quilt was in Washington, and during a service at that time, in the heart of Washington's gay community, the priest at the church began a sermon with the words, `Today, few of us know the meaning of a plague like leprosy....' Sullivan of course had words with the priest afterwards, and asked him quite bluntly if he had ever heard of AIDS.

This is a very personal journal of Sullivan's, presenting his arguments in full concert with his emotions and experiences, of friends who have been public and friends who have stayed silent about their orientation and their disease, those who are reckless with their health and those who are determined against their illness, as is Sullivan himself. A remarkable journal of an interesting person.

Depravity Inescapable.......2002-07-01

Probably Sullivan's best book, especially the passages on his own personal struggles with homosexuality. Here at least he is willing to describe the differences between gays and straights more honestly than in his other pieces, and certainly more honestly than most people. In my experience (and I wish it were not so!), gays tend to share some unpleasant character traits, such as effeminacy or lack of masculinity, cliquishness, and lewdness. Sullivan gives some societal causes for these things, such as a harsh childhood environment, and the hostility of parents and public [...]. This can indeed be expected to produce unhappy results, one of which might, perhaps, be promiscuity in certain individuals; but I doubt that the promiscuity would be so widespread and would continue well after adolescence, in much more lax and tolerant times, and even in the face of a deadly venereal disease, were it not for some strong natural and innate predisposition, taste, and desire. I myself have not noticed any correlation between gay promiscuity and childhood unhappiness-except perhaps a slight inverse correlation. When one considers further the lewdness, even pornography, of even the most well-regarded pieces of gay "romance" stories, of gay newspapers and magazines, of gay bars and personal ads, of gay parades and rallies-wherever and whenever gays feel, not oppressed, but most *free* to be themselves with themselves-one is forced to suspect that some unfortunate natural difference between gay men and heterosexual men must be at work.

Sullivan attempts to try to interpret these characteristics in a more favorable light, for example, that gays are more tolerant in their relationships and more realistic. I agree that these qualities can, in limited respects, be good. But from the point of view that is most interesting to me, as someone trying to assess the romantic possibilities, I disagree that something very good can be built on such things. I also disagree that these qualities can be conducive to the best friendships. There is much more kinship between love and friendship than he realizes (for example, true friendship is an exclusive bond between two, not a carefree open network among many).

Not up to par ..........2000-11-27

I have read all of Andrew's books and this is by far the least compelling. While he does generate some interest in the first two chapter, by the third he is off into some very abusive logic. He has written an important article recently about his injection of testosterone as a treatment for HIV infection and I believe this is changing his writing style. If you compare this book with his earlier ones, it would almost appear that he has become ex-gay or at least supports the philosophy of Reparative Therapy and it's earlier genesis with Frank Worthington and Love-In-Action (San Rafael, CA). I look forward to anything he writes in the future, but cannot recommend this book to any of my friends.

A Healthy Perspective.......1999-12-29

Some of the reviews express such anger. Because not all of us have as yet found a way to "be" whole and content is not a reason to bash Sullivan because he has. Yes, he seems to blatantly extend his perspective as universal, but that doesn't mean we can't learn from his perspective. No one tale describes the full story. No one journey depicts universal experience. He's honest and real, even if you disagree with his viewpoint. Stop slamming him for how he found his way and spend a bit more time finding your own, perhaps with his help.

Please, Andrew, Stop Torturing Us!.......1999-12-04

The only response to reading this book is attempting to place a legal gag order on poor little Catholic gay boy Andrew Sullivan, who longs to be accepted by the Church and other upstanding folk. The same man who said he contracted HIV "accidentally, not recklessly" as to separate himself from the Bad Queer writes an intolerable, self-obssessed book which proves every last word from his critics. If you know whats good for you, don't read this!

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163 superb royalty-free designs in a great variety of shapes and sizes, all in fine-line swirls and scrollwork.

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