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It has long been known that Easterners exhibit more conservative attitudes, cautiousness behaviors, and self-control ability than Westerners; people in Eastern countries show stronger defensive reactions to societal threats than Western people. Are East Asians really risk averters or do some richer underlying preferences drive their behaviors in their decision-making under uncertainty? To answer this question, we examined the risk and ambiguity attitudes of East Asian populations in both gain and loss domains using classical behavioral economic experimental methods. Based on our sample of university students, we found that Easterners are more risk intolerant but more willing to accept ambiguous conditions than their Westerner counterparts in the gain domain. Perhaps surprisingly, Eastern people and Western people have a similar attitude toward risk and ambiguity in the loss domain. The higher level of risk aversion observed among East Asians may be due to the cultural difference between Western countries and Eastern countries. Historically, such risk aversion may make sense, because it would minimize the influence of numerous ecological and historical threats and socio-political practices. Our findings suggest that models that were designed to analyze and predict aggregate behaviors and markets may be ineffective for Eastern populations, and, in the future, it is of significance to develop appropriate representative agent models from the eastern perspective.

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Economically affordable housing (EAH) system is aimed to resolve the housing problem for people without housing or poorly-housed families. However, driven by the economic benefit, increasing homebuyers ineligible to purchase EAH provide fake materials to acquire EAH, which makes EAH system deviate from its original aim. In the paper, we put forth the critical value of surveillance intensity by the government through the game analysis on the government and the fraudulent purchasers and conclude that the fraudulent purchase can be effectively controlled as long as the critical value is satisfied. Based on this, punishment measures and intensities for the fraudulent purchase are surveyed and quantified, and thus come up with the various supervision and surveillance intensities needed by the government for each punishment measure. This provides a theoretical basis and quantitative standard for the government to formulate an effective management system.

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In this paper, we study the pattern of S&P 500 index options implied volatility (IV) curves and their predictive ability for the variance risk premium (VRP).We explore this predictability employing by the Zhang and Xiang IV factor estimation. We show that the level factor term spread significantly predicts the VRP, proxied by straddle returns and variance swap returns, in both in-sample and out-of-sample tests. The predictability is more pronounced for straddle returns rather than variance swap returns.