Undergraduate Honors Theses

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CNISS provides a forum for undergraduates pursuing honors in different disciplines, including Economis, Political Science, and Anthropology, to learn about related research being done across these disciplinary boundaries. With faculty assistance, these students compete for funding to help them along with their work on their honor theses. CNISS organizes an annual conference of these students every spring break to present their research. Below are the abstracts of the papers of prize winners from previous years (the prize is $250 per winner):

2004 Winner: Are General Managers Generally Wrong? A Study of Pay, Performance, and Win Shares in Major League Baseball
Daniel Bikoff
This paper examines the relationship between player performance and salary. It has been shown that most general managers do not use the best system available for gauging player performance, known as Win Shares, and this results in a misallocation of resources. If this has been occurring in the labor market of baseball, which provides precise statistical measurement, then this problem could be widespread in other labor markets such as sports and education. Therefore the issue goes beyond the baseball park. Baseball data from the 2002 and 2003 seasons are used to test the hypothesis that the system general managers rely on to measure performance and value players converges to the Win Shares system as player experience increases. The results suggest that this hypothesis is incorrect, and that general managers do not improve their ability to value players.

2004 Winner: Force and Political Parties
Ari Blaut
Ari studied political parties' effect on presidential decisions to threaten force and political parties' potential signaling effects in international situations. Ari, a 2004 graduate in Political Sciences, is currently a law student at Georgetown School of Law.

2002 Winner: The Curious Stability of the European Union: A Formal Model of Decision-Making in the European Union
Paul S. Frederiksen
Where most social choice literature describes in great detail the inherent instability of majority rule, existing models of decision-making in the European Union (EU) suggest that the EU's treaty base provides for a surprisingly stable political order. Not only does the EU legislative process (practically) guarantee the existence of a set of stable political outcomes - a core will exist - the set of stable outcomes for which the legislature provides is quite substantial - the core is generally very large. In this paper, I use social choice theory and cooperative game theory to construct a formal, two-dimensional spatial model that captures the stabilizing institutional features of the EU legislative process. I demonstrate that elements of bicameralism - found in the interaction between the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament - coupled with a unique type of executive agenda setter in the Commission help to explain the EU's seemingly intrinsic stability. Moreover, I examine the stabilizing properties of institutional features, such as the separation between legislative institutions and the use of supermajority voting rules. Using these components of the EU's legislative apparatus, I show how the size of the core in the EU varies with the application of the EU's four decision rules, consultation, cooperation, co-decision, and assent. By implication, the model I propose confirms other scholars' contentions that the EU has a heavy status-quo bias, and it suggests a method for placing legislative proposals in a policy space nad predicting their path through the legislative game.

2001 Winner: The Political and Economic History of Republican and Imperial Rome
Donald Cohn
A primary goal of social science remains understanding the origin and evolution of stable and legitimate institutions. As nations across the world struggle to achieve any version of the civil state and actors reform existing institutions, the study of institution matters. To properly understand and explain the dynamic history of a nation, theory must show consistency with the empirical world. Although academic literature contains institution by design theories that focus on phenomenon like transaction costs, and social capital, few investigate the role of individuals working within the constraints of institutions. The bargained social contract theory endows government and relevant players in a government with rational preference profiles and explains the evolution of institutions as a complex political bargaining game. This work examines the political and economic history of Republican and Imperial Rome as a case study showing consistency between the bargained social contract theory and the establishment and evolution of Roman institutions.

2001 Winner: Mergers, Innovation, and Schumpeterian Theory: A Study of Pharmaceutical Firms
Andrea Liapis
In 1950 Joseph Schumpeter argued in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy that large firms and imperfect competition promote technological innovation. The pharmaceutical industry, the most research intense in the world experienced major mergers in the 1980s and 1990s. Is this market activity a manifestation of Schumpeter's hypothesis that large firms are better equipped for technological innovation? Through careful analysis of three mergers, this paper concludes that, despite both real and proportionate increases in funding for innovative activity, larger pharmaceutical firms are inferior innovators and produce significantly less technological output, consistent with the overall level of competition in the industry.