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Truth By Consensus: A Theoretical And Empirical Investigation, Gabriele Camera, Rod Garratt, Cyril Monnet
Truth By Consensus: A Theoretical And Empirical Investigation, Gabriele Camera, Rod Garratt, Cyril Monnet
ESI Working Papers
Truthful reporting about publicly observed events cannot be guaranteed by a consensus process. This fact, which we establish theoretically and verify empirically, holds true even if some individuals are compelled to tell the truth, regardless of economic incentives. In an experiment, subjects routinely misreported a commonly known event when they could monetarily gain from it. Relying on majority consensus did not help uncover the truth, especially if complying with the majority granted small personal monetary gains. This highlights the difficulties in relying on shared consensus protocols to agree on specific events, and the importance of institutions with trusted, impartial observers.
Choice Flexibility And Long-Run Cooperation, Gabriele Camera, Jaehong Kim, David Rojo Arjona
Choice Flexibility And Long-Run Cooperation, Gabriele Camera, Jaehong Kim, David Rojo Arjona
ESI Working Papers
Understanding how incentives and institutions help scaling up cooperation is important, especially when strategic uncertainty is considerable. Evidence suggests that this is challenging even when full cooperation is theoretically sustainable thanks to indefinite repetition. In a controlled social dilemma experiment, we show that adding partial cooperation choices to the usual binary choice environment can raise cooperation and efficiency. Under suitable incentives, partial cooperation choices enable individuals to cheaply signal their desire to cooperate, reducing strategic uncertainty. The insight is that richer choice sets can form the basis of a language meaningful for coordinating on cooperation.
Does Free Information Provision Crowd Out Costly Information Acquisition? It’S A Matter Of Timing, Diego Aycinena, Alexander Elbittar, Andrei Gomberg, Lucas Rentschler
Does Free Information Provision Crowd Out Costly Information Acquisition? It’S A Matter Of Timing, Diego Aycinena, Alexander Elbittar, Andrei Gomberg, Lucas Rentschler
ESI Working Papers
We consider the issue of how timing of provision of additional information affects information-acquisition incentives. In environments with costly attention, a sufficiently confident agent may choose to act based on the prior, without incurring those costs. However, a promise of additional information in the future may be used to encourage additional attentional effort. This may be viewed as a novel empirical implication of rational inattention. In a lab experiment designed to test this theoretical prediction, we show that promise of future “free” information induces subjects to acquire information which they would not be acquiring without such a promise.
Public Leaderboard Feedback In Sampling Competition: An Experimental Investigation, Stanton Hudja, Brian Roberson, Yaroslav Rosokha
Public Leaderboard Feedback In Sampling Competition: An Experimental Investigation, Stanton Hudja, Brian Roberson, Yaroslav Rosokha
ESI Working Papers
We investigate the role of performance feedback, in the form of a public leaderboard, in a sequential-sampling contest with costly observations. The player whose sequential random sample contains the observation with the highest value wins the contest and obtains a prize with a fixed value. We find that there exist parameter configurations such that in the subgame perfect equilibrium of contests with a fixed ending date (i.e., finite horizon), providing public performance feedback results in fewer expected observations and a lower expected value of the winning observation. We conduct a controlled laboratory experiment to test the theoretical predictions, and find …
Working Too Much For Too Little: Stochastic Rewards Cause Work Addiction, Brice Corgnet, Simon Gaechter, Roberto Hernán González
Working Too Much For Too Little: Stochastic Rewards Cause Work Addiction, Brice Corgnet, Simon Gaechter, Roberto Hernán González
ESI Working Papers
People are generally assumed to shy away from activities generating stochastic rewards, thus re-quiring extra compensation for handling any additional risk. In contrast with this view, neurosci-ence research with animals has shown that stochastic rewards may act as a powerful motivator. Applying these ideas to the study of work addiction in humans, and using a new experimental paradigm, we demonstrate how stochastic rewards may lead people to continue working on a re-petitive and effortful task even after monetary compensation becomes saliently negligible. In line with our hypotheses, we show that persistence on the work task is especially pronounced when the …
Do Economic Inequalities Affect Long-Run Cooperation & Prosperity?, Gabriele Camera, Cary Deck, David Porter
Do Economic Inequalities Affect Long-Run Cooperation & Prosperity?, Gabriele Camera, Cary Deck, David Porter
ESI Working Papers
We explore if fairness and inequality motivations affect cooperation in indefinitely repeated games. Each round, we randomly divided experimental participants into donor-recipient pairs. Donors could make a gift to recipients, and ex-ante earnings are highest when all donors give. Roles were randomly reassigned every period, which induced inequality in ex-post earnings. Theoretically, income-maximizing players do not have to condition on this inequality because it is payoff-irrelevant. Empirically, payoff-irrelevant inequality affected participants’ ability to coordinate on efficient play: donors conditioned gifts on their own past roles and, with inequalities made visible, discriminated against those who were better off.
Reconsidering Rational Expectations And The Aggregation Of Diverse Information In Laboratory Security Markets, Brice Corgnet, Cary Deck, Mark Desantis, Kyle Hampton, Erik O. Kimbrough
Reconsidering Rational Expectations And The Aggregation Of Diverse Information In Laboratory Security Markets, Brice Corgnet, Cary Deck, Mark Desantis, Kyle Hampton, Erik O. Kimbrough
ESI Working Papers
The ability of markets to aggregate diverse information is a cornerstone of economics and finance, and empirical evidence for such aggregation has been demonstrated in previous laboratory experiments. Most notably Plott and Sunder (1988) find clear support for the rational expectations hypothesis in their Series B and C markets. However, recent studies have called into question the robustness of these findings. In this paper, we report the result of a direct replication of the key information aggregation results presented in Plott and Sunder. We do not find the same strong evidence in support of rational expectations that Plott and Sunder …
Money Is More Than Memory, Maria Bigoni, Gabriele Camera, Marco Casari
Money Is More Than Memory, Maria Bigoni, Gabriele Camera, Marco Casari
ESI Working Papers
Impersonal exchange is the hallmark of an advanced society and money is one key institution that supports it. Economic theory regards money as a crude arrangement for monitoring counterparts’ past conduct. If so, then a public record of past actions—or memory—should supersede the function performed by money. This intriguing theoretical postulate remains untested. In an experiment, we show that the suggested functional equivalence between money and memory does not translate into an empirical equivalence: money removed the incentives to free ride, while memory did not. Monetary systems performed a richer set of functions than just revealing past behaviors.
The Supply Side Determinants Of Territory And Conflict, Jordan Adamson, Erik O. Kimbrough
The Supply Side Determinants Of Territory And Conflict, Jordan Adamson, Erik O. Kimbrough
ESI Working Papers
What determines the geographic extent of territory? We microfound and extend Boulding’s “Loss of Strength Gradient” to predict the extensive and intensive margins of conflict across space. We show how economies of scale in the production of violence and varying costs of projecting violence at a distance combine to affect the geographic distribution of conflict and territory. We test and probe the boundaries of this model in an experiment varying the fixed costs of conflict entry. As predicted, higher fixed costs increase the probability of exclusive territories; median behavior closely tracks equilibrium predictions in all treatments.
Impulsive Behavior In Competition: Testing Theories Of Overbidding In Rent-Seeking Contests, Roman M. Sheremeta
Impulsive Behavior In Competition: Testing Theories Of Overbidding In Rent-Seeking Contests, Roman M. Sheremeta
ESI Working Papers
Contests are commonly used in the workplace to motivate workers, determine promotion, and assign bonuses. Although contests can be very effective at eliciting high effort, they can also lead to inefficient effort expenditure (overbidding). Researchers have proposed various theories to explain overbidding in contents, including mistakes, systematic biases, the utility of winning, and relative payoff maximization. Using an eight-part experiment, we test and find significant support for the existing theories. Also, we discover some new explanations based on cognitive ability and impulsive behavior. Out of all explanations examined, we find that impulsivity is the most important factor explaining overbidding in …
New Hampshire Effect: Behavior In Sequential And Simultaneous Multi-Battle Contests, Shakun D. Mago, Roman M. Sheremeta
New Hampshire Effect: Behavior In Sequential And Simultaneous Multi-Battle Contests, Shakun D. Mago, Roman M. Sheremeta
ESI Working Papers
Sequential multi-battle contests are predicted to induce lower expenditure than simultaneous contests. This prediction is a result of a “New Hampshire Effect” – a strategic advantage created by the winner of the first battle. Although our laboratory study provides evidence for the New Hampshire Effect, we find that sequential contests generate significantly higher (not lower) expenditure than simultaneous contests. This is mainly because in sequential contests, there is significant over-expenditure in all battles. We suggest sunk cost fallacy and utility of winning as two complementary explanations for this behavior and provide supporting evidence.
The Attack And Defense Of Weakest Link Networks, Dan Kovenock, Brian Roberson, Roman M. Sheremeta
The Attack And Defense Of Weakest Link Networks, Dan Kovenock, Brian Roberson, Roman M. Sheremeta
ESI Working Papers
We experimentally test the qualitatively different equilibrium predictions of two theoretical models of attack and defense of a weakest-link network of targets. In such a network, the attacker’s objective is to successfully attack at least one target and the defender’s objective is to defend all targets. The models differ in how the conflict at each target is modeled — specifically, the lottery and auction contest success functions (CSFs). Consistent with equilibrium in the auction CSF model, attackers utilize a stochastic “guerrilla-warfare” strategy, which involves randomly attacking at most one target with a random level of force. Inconsistent with equilibrium in …
On The Robustness Of Higher Order Risk Preferences, Cary Deck, Harris Schlesinger
On The Robustness Of Higher Order Risk Preferences, Cary Deck, Harris Schlesinger
ESI Working Papers
Economists have begun to recognize the role that higher order risk preferences play in a variety of settings. As such, several experiments have documented the degree of prudence, temperance, and to a lesser extent, edginess and bentness that laboratory subjects exhibit. More recently, researchers have argued that higher order risk preferences generally conform to mixed risk averse and mixed risk loving patterns that arise from a preference for disaggregating or aggregating harms, respectively. This paper examines the robustness of this pattern in three ways. First, it attempts to directly replicate previous results with compound lotteries over monetary outcomes. Second, it …
Multi-Battle Contests: An Experimental Study, Shakun D. Mago, Roman M. Sheremeta
Multi-Battle Contests: An Experimental Study, Shakun D. Mago, Roman M. Sheremeta
ESI Working Papers
We examine behavior of subjects in simultaneous and sequential multi-battle contests, where each individual battle is modeled as an all-pay auction with complete information. In simultaneous best-of-three contests, subjects are predicted to make positive bids in all three battles, but we find that subjects often make positive bids in only two battles. In sequential contests, theory predicts sizable bids in the first battle and no bids in the subsequent battles. Contrary to this prediction, subjects significantly underbid in the first battle and overbid in subsequent battles. Consequently, instead of always ending in the second battle, contests often proceeds to the …
Impulsive Behavior In Competition: Testing Theories Of Overbidding In Rent-Seeking Contests, Roman M. Sheremeta
Impulsive Behavior In Competition: Testing Theories Of Overbidding In Rent-Seeking Contests, Roman M. Sheremeta
ESI Working Papers
Researchers have proposed various theories to explain overbidding in rent-seeking contents, including mistakes, systematic biases, the utility of winning, and relative payoff maximization. Through an eight-part experiment, we test and find significant support for the existing theories. Also, we discover some new explanations based on cognitive ability and impulsive behavior. Out of all explanations examined, we find that impulsivity is the most important factor explaining overbidding in contests.
Do Economic Inequalities Affect Long-Run Cooperation?, Gabriele Camera, Cary Deck, David Porter
Do Economic Inequalities Affect Long-Run Cooperation?, Gabriele Camera, Cary Deck, David Porter
ESI Working Papers
Does inequality affect a group’s cohesion and ability to prosper? Participants in laboratory economies played an indefinite sequence of helping games in random, anonymous pairs. A coin flip determined donor and recipient roles in each pair. This random shock ensured equality of opportunity but not of results, because earnings depended on realized shocks. We manipulated the ability to condition choices on this uncontrollable inequality source. In all treatments, uncertain ending supports multiple Pareto-ranked equilibria, including full cooperation. Theoretically, inequalities do not alter the incentives’ structure. Empirically, inequality disclosures altered conduct, weakened norms of mutual support and reduced efficiency.
The Impact Of Taxes And Wasteful Government Spending On Giving, Roman M. Sheremeta, Neslihan Uler
The Impact Of Taxes And Wasteful Government Spending On Giving, Roman M. Sheremeta, Neslihan Uler
ESI Working Papers
We examine the impact of taxes and wasteful government spending on charitable giving. In our model, the government collects a flat-rate tax on income net of donations and wastes part of the tax revenue before redistribution. The model provides theoretical predictions which we test in a framed field experiment. The results of the experiment show that the tax rate has a weak and insignificant effect on giving. The degree of waste, however, has a large, negative and significant effect on giving, with the relationship moderated by the curvature in the utility function.
Money And The Scale Of Cooperation, Maria Bigoni, Gabriele Camera, Marco Casari
Money And The Scale Of Cooperation, Maria Bigoni, Gabriele Camera, Marco Casari
ESI Working Papers
This study reveals the existence of a causal link between the availability of money and an expanded scale of interaction. We constructed an experiment where participants chose the group size, either a low-value partnership or a high-value group of strangers, and then faced an intertemporal cooperative task. Theoretically, a monetary system was inessential to achieve cooperation. Empirically, without a working monetary system, participants were reluctant to expand the scale of interaction; and when they did, they ended up destroying surplus compared to partnerships, because cooperation collapsed in large groups. This economic failure was reversed only when participants managed to concurrently …
Competition Between And Within Universities: Theoretical And Experimental Investigation Of Group Identity And The Desire To Win, Zhuoqiong Charlie Chen, David Ong, Roman M. Sheremeta
Competition Between And Within Universities: Theoretical And Experimental Investigation Of Group Identity And The Desire To Win, Zhuoqiong Charlie Chen, David Ong, Roman M. Sheremeta
ESI Working Papers
We study how salient group identity, created through competition between students from different universities, as well as differences in the value of winning impact competitive behavior. Our experiment employs a simple all-pay auction within and between two university subject pools. We find that when competing against their peers, students within the lower tier university bid more aggressively than students within the top-tier university. Also, students from the lower tier university, in particular women, bid more aggressively when competing against students from the top-tier university. These findings, interpreted through a theoretical model incorporating both group identity and differential value of winning, …
Behavior In Group Contests: A Review Of Experimental Research, Roman Sheremeta
Behavior In Group Contests: A Review Of Experimental Research, Roman Sheremeta
ESI Working Papers
Group contests are ubiquitous. Some examples include warfare between countries, competition between political parties, team-incentives within firms, group sports, and rent-seeking. In order to succeed, members of the same group have incentives to cooperate with each other by expending individual efforts. However, since effort is costly, each member also has an incentive to abstain from expending any effort and instead free-ride on the efforts of other members. Contest theory shows that the intensity of competition between groups and the amount of free-riding within groups depend on the group size, sharing rule, group impact function, contest success function, and heterogeneity of …
Asymmetric And Endogenous Within-Group Communication In Competitive Coordination Games, Timothy N. Cason, Roman Sheremeta, Jingjing Zhang
Asymmetric And Endogenous Within-Group Communication In Competitive Coordination Games, Timothy N. Cason, Roman Sheremeta, Jingjing Zhang
ESI Working Papers
Within-group communication in competitive coordination games has been shown to increase competition between groups and lower efficiency. This study further explores potentially harmful effects of communication, by addressing the questions of (i) asymmetric communication and (ii) the endogenous emergence of communication. Our theoretical analysis provides testable hypotheses regarding the effect of communication on competitive behavior and efficiency. We test these predictions using a laboratory experiment. The experiment shows that although asymmetric communication is not as harmful as symmetric communication, it leads to more aggressive competition and lower efficiency relative to the case when neither group can communicate. Moreover, groups vote …
Asymmetric And Endogenous Communication In Competition Between Groups, Timothy N. Cason, Roman Sheremeta, Jingjing Zhang
Asymmetric And Endogenous Communication In Competition Between Groups, Timothy N. Cason, Roman Sheremeta, Jingjing Zhang
ESI Working Papers
Costless pre-play communication has been shown to effectively facilitate within-group coordination. However, in competitive coordination games, such as rent-seeking contests, better within-group coordination leads to more aggressive competition and lower efficiency. We report an experiment in which two groups compete in a weakest-link contest by expending costly efforts. We find that allowing within-group communication makes groups compete more aggressively. When only one group can communicate, the communicating group coordinates better and expends higher efforts than the non-communicating group. However, the communicating group earns payoffs that are not different from the baseline contest without any communication, while the non-communicating group earns …
The Gender Difference In The Value Of Winning, Zhuoqiong (Charlie) Chen, David Ong, Roman Sheremeta
The Gender Difference In The Value Of Winning, Zhuoqiong (Charlie) Chen, David Ong, Roman Sheremeta
ESI Working Papers
We design an all-pay auction experiment in which we reveal the gender of the opponent. Using this design, we find that women bid higher than men, but only when bidding against other women. These findings, interpreted through a theoretical model incorporating differences in risk attitude and the value of winning, suggest that women have a higher value of winning than men.
Cognitive Reflection Test: Whom, How, When, Pablo Brañas-Garza, Praveen Kujal, Balint Lenkei
Cognitive Reflection Test: Whom, How, When, Pablo Brañas-Garza, Praveen Kujal, Balint Lenkei
ESI Working Papers
We report the results of a meta-study of 118 Cognitive Reflection Test studies comprising of 44,558 participants across 21 countries. There is a negative correlation between being female and the overall, and individual, correct answers to CRT questions. Taking the test at the end of an experiment negatively impacts performance. Monetary incentives do not impact performance. Overall students perform better compared to non-student samples. Exposure to CRT over the years may impact outcomes, however, the effect is driven by online studies. We obtain mixed evidence on whether the sequence of questions matters. Finally, we find that computerized tests marginally improve …
Selective Recognition: How To Recognize Donors To Increase Charitable Giving, Anya Samek, Roman Sheremeta
Selective Recognition: How To Recognize Donors To Increase Charitable Giving, Anya Samek, Roman Sheremeta
ESI Working Papers
Recognizing donors by revealing their identities is important for increasing charitable giving. We conducted a field experiment to examine how different recognition methods impact giving, and found that all forms of recognition that we examined had a positive impact on increasing donations, whereby recognizing only highest donors (positive recognition) and recognizing only lowest donors (negative recognition) had the most pronounced effect. We argue that selective recognition (both positive and negative) creates tournament-like incentives. Recognizing the highest donors activates the desire to seek a positive prize of prestige, thus increasing the proportion of donors who contribute large amounts. Recognizing the lowest …
People Do Not Discount Heavily In Strategic Settings, But They Believe Others Do, Cary Deck, Salar Jahedi
People Do Not Discount Heavily In Strategic Settings, But They Believe Others Do, Cary Deck, Salar Jahedi
ESI Working Papers
Several studies have shown that people greatly discount future bene ts and costs. However, most of the direct laboratory evidence of this phenomenon has focused on individual choice experiments. This paper investigates the degree to which the timing of payments a ects behavior in four commonly studies strategic settings: a Prisoner's Dilemma game, a Stag-Hunt game, a First Price Auction and a Second Price Auction. In all four settings, a two week delay in payo s has a comparable e ect to a 20% reduc- tion in current payo s. A follow-up study suggests that it is an individual's strategic …
Predictable And Predictive Emotions: Explaining Cheap Signals And Trust Re-Extension, Eric Schniter, Roman M. Sheremeta
Predictable And Predictive Emotions: Explaining Cheap Signals And Trust Re-Extension, Eric Schniter, Roman M. Sheremeta
ESI Working Papers
Despite normative predictions from economics and biology, unrelated strangers can often develop the trust necessary to reap gains from one-shot economic exchange opportunities. This appears to be especially true when declared intentions and emotions can be cheaply communicated. Perhaps even more puzzling to economists and biologists is the observation that anonymous and unrelated individuals, known to have breached trust, often make effective use of cheap signals, such as promises and apologies, to encourage trust re-extension. We used a pair of trust games with one-way communication and emotion surveys to investigate the role of emotions in regulating the propensity to message, …
Why Can’T We Be Friends? Entitlements And The Costs Of Conflict, Erik O. Kimbrough, Roman M. Sheremeta
Why Can’T We Be Friends? Entitlements And The Costs Of Conflict, Erik O. Kimbrough, Roman M. Sheremeta
ESI Working Papers
We design an experiment to explore the impact of earned entitlements on the frequency and intensity of conflicts in a two-stage conflict game where players may attempt to use non-binding side-payments to avoid conflict. In this game, Proposers make offers and Responders decide simultaneously whether to accept the offers and whether to engage in a conflict. A simple theoretical analysis suggests that Proposers should never offer side-payments because Responders should always accept them and then still choose to enter conflict; however, our experiment reveals that some individuals use this non-binding mechanism to avoid conflict. Moreover, when subjects earn their roles …
Divided Loyalists Or Conditional Cooperators? Creating Consensus About Cooperation In Multiple Simultaneous Social Dilemmas, Matthew W. Mccarter, Anya C. Samak, Roman M. Sheremeta
Divided Loyalists Or Conditional Cooperators? Creating Consensus About Cooperation In Multiple Simultaneous Social Dilemmas, Matthew W. Mccarter, Anya C. Samak, Roman M. Sheremeta
ESI Working Papers
The current social dilemma literature lacks theoretical consensus regarding how individuals behave when facing multiple simultaneous social dilemmas. The divided-loyalty hypothesis, from organizational theory, predicts that cooperation will decline as individuals experience multiple social dilemmas with different compared to the same group members. The conditional-cooperation hypothesis, from behavioral economics, predicts that cooperation will increase as individuals experience multiple social dilemmas with different compared to the same group members. We employ a laboratory experiment to create consensus between these literatures and find support for the conditional-cooperation hypothesis. The positive effect of interacting with different group members comes from participants having an …
Money Is More Than Memory, Maria Bigoni, Gabriele Camera, Marco Casari
Money Is More Than Memory, Maria Bigoni, Gabriele Camera, Marco Casari
ESI Working Papers
Impersonal exchange is the hallmark of an advanced society. One key institution for impersonal exchange is money, which economic theory considers just a primitive arrangement for monitoring past conduct in society. If so, then a public record of past actions—or memory—supersedes the function performed by money. This intriguing theoretical postulate remains untested. In an experiment, we show that the suggested functional equality between money and memory does not translate into an empirical equivalence. Monetary systems perform a richer set of functions than just revealing past behaviors, which proves to be crucial in promoting large-scale cooperation.