User:Jacob Kosoff
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Jacob Kosoff (born May 13, 1981) is an American economist best known for his work on discrimination, in particular on contestant behaviour on the South African version of the television show the Weakest Link. Winner of the 2004 Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship, he is a lecturer and course coordinator at the University of the Witwatersrand. He consults part time for Genesis Analytics, an economic consultancy based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
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[edit] Education
He attended public schools in Burlington Township, New Jersey and the US House Page School in Washington, DC. Kosoff graduated from Penn State in 2002 with a Bachelor of Science in Economics Honors), and his Schreyer Honors College thesis predicted the economic effects of an Eastward enlargement of the European Union. His supervisors were Professors David Shapiro and Jim Tybout.
Kosoff received his Master of Commerce in Economics from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2006.
[edit] Work
His work on various economics topics, including discrimination, anti-trust and international trade.
[edit] Discrimination
Kosoff's work on discimination includes a paper on contestant voting behaviour on the South African version of the televised game show the Weakest Link.
Discrimination remains a fundamental feature of societies and the imperativeness of understanding discrimination has not diminished in post-apartheid South Africa. Two leading theories of discrimination have emerged in an attempt to explain individual behaviour in relation to discrimination. Measuring discrimination and distinguishing between the two leading theories of discrimination is empirically difficult.
South African contestant behaviour on the game show the Weakest Link offers a chance to empirically distinguish and measure discrimination. Kosoff's paper builds on the work of Steven Levitt (2004), who applied these concepts to the US version of the Weakest Link and has been an inspiration for this proposal. Contestants on the Weakest Link answer trivia questions and vote off other contestants, while contending for a winner-take-all cash prize. The dominant contestant behaviour that appears is to vote off the weakest contestants in the early rounds and the strongest contestants in the later rounds. This switch from voting off the weakest contestants to voting off the strongest contestants, offers a unique and valuable way to test two different theories of discrimination. Controlling for number of correct answers, both theories of discrimination predict more votes towards the discriminated group in the early rounds. In the later rounds, the taste-based discrimination would predict continued extra votes towards the discriminated group; while the incomplete information-based discrimination would predict fewer votes towards the discriminated group.
Using South African Weakest Link contestant voting behaviour as the data set, Kosoff's paper proposes to distinguish between the two types of discrimination. To the extent that either discrimination is found, the his paper examines the magnitude of these discriminations and analyze how these types of discriminations can be interpreted in a South African context.
