Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Fear Of China's Economic Power: Media And Party Affiliation On Public Opinion, Cloe Hughes

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The United States and China are the world’s two greatest economic rivals. The US-China trade war–which started in 2018–is a result of this battle for economic hegemony and has raged on for the past six years. While trade decisions are ultimately up to policymakers, public opinion is a large factor in international policy decisions, and American biases against the Chinese may adversely affect both the American and Chinese economies. In this paper, I will examine how factors including media consumption and partisanship impact American attitudes towards China’s economy overtaking the United States’ economy. Previous research has studied the effects of …

Cooperation In Temporary Partnerships, Gabriele Camera, Alessandro Gioffré

ESI Working Papers

The literature on cooperation in infinitely repeated Prisoner’s Dilemmas covers the extreme opposites of the matching spectrum: partners, a player’s opponent never changes, and strangers, a player’s opponent randomly changes in every period. Here, we extend the analysis to settings where the opponent changes, but not in every period. In these temporary partnerships, players can deter some deviations by directly sanctioning their partner. Hence, relaxing the extreme assumption of one-period matchings can support some cooperation also off equilibrium because a class of strategies emerges that are less extreme than the typical “grim” strategy. We establish conditions supporting full …

Who Helps Tsimane Children And Adults?, Eric Schniter, Daniel K. Cummings, Paul L. Hooper, Maguin Gutierrez Cayuba, Jonathan Stieglitz, Benjamin C. Trumble, Hillard S. Kaplan, Michael D. Gurven

ESI Working Papers

We consider several forms of helping behavior among Tsimane Amerindians of Bolivia, including provision of shelter, childcare, food, sickcare, loans, advice, and cultural influence. While kin selection theory is traditionally invoked to explain nepotistic nurturing of youngsters by closely related kin, much less attention has been given to understanding the help provided to children and adults by individuals without close genetic relatedness. To explain who provides the various forms of help that we consider, we evaluate support for several predictions derived from kin selection theory: that helpers are most often closely related and from an older generation, provide more help …

Ambiguity And Ambiguity Attitudes Across Auctions, Cary Deck, Paan Jindapon, Tigran Melkonyan, Mark Schneider

ESI Working Papers

Studies of ambiguity perceptions and attitudes are moving beyond the Ellsberg urn to examine people’s responses to ambiguity in naturally occurring events, games, and financial markets. In this study, we measure ambiguity perceptions and attitudes for market prices and allocations in four classical auction formats (first-price and second-price sealed bid auctions, English and Dutch clock auctions). We find ambiguity attitudes, representing individual preferences, are stable across auctions. However, the perceived ambiguity surrounding auction prices is lowest for English clock auctions which are obviously strategyproof (OSP), followed by second-price auctions which are strategyproof (SP), followed by a tie between first-price and …

Cognitive Abilities And Individual Earnings In Hybrid Continuous Double Auctions, Yan Peng, Jason Shachat, Lijia Wei, S. Sarah Zhang

ESI Working Papers

We study the influence of cognitive abilities, in particular reaction time, trader intuition (Theory of Mind), and cognitive reflection abilities, on human participants’ individual earnings when competing alongside algorithmic traders in continuous double auctions. In balanced markets, where each human trader has an algorithmic trader clone with the same valuations or costs, faster human reaction time significantly improves trading performance, while Theory of Mind can be detrimental to human trading performance, particularly for sellers. For unbalanced markets with humans and algorithmic traders on opposite sides of the market, the effects of cognitive abilities depend on trader role as well as …

Coordinated And Uncoordinated Punishment In A Team Investment Game, Vicente Calabuig, Natalia Jiménez-Jiménez, Gonzalo Olcina, Ismael Rodriguez-Lara

ESI Publications

Coordinated punishment occurs when punishment requires a specific number of punishers to be effective, otherwise, no damage will be inflicted on the target. While societies often rely on this punishment device, its benefits are unclear compared to uncoordinated punishment, where punishment decisions are substitutes. In this paper, we compare the efficacy of coordinated and uncoordinated punishment in a team investment game with two investors and one allocator. Our findings indicate that coordinated punishment results in higher levels of cooperation and reciprocity, as measured by the levels of joint investment and the return by allocators. Importantly, this does not translate into …

One-Half Heuristic In Overconfidence Research, Vojtěch Zíka

ESI Working Papers

This laboratory experiment (N=120) explored the possibility that overconfidence research concerning overestimation and overplacement may be affected by the one-half heuristic, a tendency of individuals to estimate quantities with unknown distributions at half of the maximum value. The data from multiple rounds of the computerized hand game Rock–Paper–Scissors provide convincing evidence that half of the maximum is the most popular estimate and that manipulating the game’s average score can affect the direction and magnitude of estimation, averaging, and placement levels. The resulting methodological proposal is that the score participants estimate should have an expected value equal to half of the …

How Does Passive Investing Effect The Informational Efficiency Of Prices?, Brice Corgnet, Mark Desantis, Yan Peng, David Porter, Jason Shachat

ESI Working Papers

We investigate the causal effects of passive investing on informational efficiency and market quality metrics by developing a novel laboratory experiment that introduces Index trackers with exogenous passive investment flows. We find that, while improving liquidity, Index tracking hurts informational efficiency, confirming our main hypothesis. Furthermore, we observe violations of the law of one price, leading to widespread and persistent arbitrage opportunities. Additionally, our research uncovers that Active traders, particularly those with private information about asset values and high cognitive ability, reap benefits from the introduction of Index tracking.

Sleep Restriction Alters The Integration Of Multiple Information Sources In Probabilistic Decision-Making, Jeryl Y. L. Lim, Johanna M. Boardman, Clare Anderson, David L. Dickinson, Daniel Bennett, Sean P. A. Drummond

ESI Publications

The detrimental effects of sleep loss on overall decision-making have been well described. Due to the complex nature of decisions, there remains a need for studies to identify specific mechanisms of decision-making vulnerable to sleep loss. Bayesian perspectives of decision-making posit judgement formation during decision-making occurs via a process of integrating knowledge gleaned from past experiences (priors) with new information from current observations (likelihoods). We investigated the effects of sleep loss on the ability to integrate multiple sources of information during decision-making by reporting results from two experiments: the first implementing both sleep restriction (SR) and …

Representation And Bracketing In Repeated Games, Mouli Modak

ESI Working Papers

In this experimental paper, the author investigates the framing effect of different representations of multiple strategic settings or games on a player’s strategic behavior. Two representations of the same environment are employed, wherein a player engages in two infinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma games. In the first representation (termed Split), the stage games are shown separately. In contrast, the second representation (termed Linked) displays a combined stage game. The choice bracketing, distinguishing between Narrow and Broad bracketing, is considered a potential cause behind any disparity in behavior between the two representations. The Split representation does not necessitate broad bracketing, whereas the …

How Personalized Networks Can Limit Free Riding: A Multi-Group Version Of The Public Goods Game, Aaron S. Berman, Laurence R. Iannaccone, Mouli Modak

ESI Working Papers

People belong to many different groups, and few belong to the same network of groups. Moreover, people routinely reduce their involvement in dysfunctional groups while increasing involvement in those they find more attractive. The net effect can be an increase in overall cooperation and the partial isolation of free-riders, even if free-riders are never punished, excluded, or recognized. We formalize and test this conjecture with an agent-based social simulation and a multi-good extension of the standard repeated public goods game. Our initial results from three treatments suggest that the multi-group setting indeed raises overall cooperation and dampens the impact of …

Personal Lies, Gary Charness, Ismael Rodriguez-Lara

ESI Working Papers

Using the mind game, we provide experimental evidence that people are more likely to lie when they disclose non-personal information (e.g., reporting a number they thought of) compared with personal information (e.g., reporting the last digit of their birth year). Our findings suggest that the type of information is an important factor for lying behavior.

Financial Contagion And Financial Lockdowns, Gabriele Camera, Alessandro Gioffré

ESI Working Papers

Extreme financial shocks often elicit extraordinary policy interventions that preclude financial activity on a large scale, for example as the 1933 U.S. “bank holiday.” We study these interventions using a random matching framework where the financial contagion process is explicit and the diffusion of the initial shock can be analytically characterized. The study suggests that there is scope for forced closures of individual firms or even economy-wide financial lockdowns only when firms are financially vulnerable and policy institutions are not well-functioning. Here, ordinary policy alone cannot prevent or sufficiently mitigate contagion, while complementing it with a lockdown or individual closures …

Evolution Of Primate Vocal Repertoires: Vocalization Systems As Embodied Capital For Mediating Within-Group Conflict, Eric Schniter, Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre

ESI Working Papers

Phylogenetic studies of communication help us understand evolutionary changes that led to human language – a form of primate communication, extraordinarily complex in terms of its varied vocalizations. Here we describe the macro-evolutionary role of life history traits on primate vocalization systems, informing our understanding of the relationships between social complexity and primate vocal repertoire size. We reviewed the primatological literature and collected information on the vocal repertoire size, social conflict, group size, endocranial volume, and maximum longevity of 42 non-human primate species. We conducted a set of analyses to examine the role of these factors on the macroevolution of …

Human-Robot Interactions: Insights From Experimental And Evolutionary Social Sciences, Eric Schniter

ESI Working Papers

"Experimental research in the realm of human-robot interactions has focused on the behavioral and psychological influences affecting human interaction and cooperation with robots. A robot is loosely defined as a device designed to perform agentic tasks autonomously or under remote control, often replicating or assisting human actions. Robots can vary widely in form, ranging from simple assembly line machines performing repetitive actions to advanced systems with no moving parts but with artificial intelligence (AI) capable of learning, problem-solving, communicating, and adapting to diverse environments and human interactions. Applications of experimental human-robot interaction research include the design, development, and implementation of …

Enlightenment Ideals And Belief In Progress In The Run-Up To The Industrial Revolution: A Textual Analysis, Ali Almelhem, Murat Iyigun, Austin Kennedy, Jared Rubin

ESI Working Papers

We trace the evolution of the language of science, religion, and political economy in the centuries leading to the British Industrial Revolution. Using textual analysis of 173,031 works printed in England between 1500 and 1900, we test whether British culture manifested a belief in progress associated with science and industry. Our analysis yields three main findings. First, there was a separation in the language of science and religion beginning in the late-17th century. Second, volumes using language at the nexus of science and political economy became more progress-oriented during the Enlightenment. Third, volumes using industrial language—especially those at the science-political …

Joining A Currency Union To Improve Financial Development And Competitiveness: The Case Of Slovakia, Etsub Tekola Jemberu, Bruce Dehning

Accounting Faculty Articles and Research

Enhancing competitiveness is a priority for nations seeking to promote economic growth. One of the critical drivers of a nation’s sustainable competitiveness is financial system development. However, whether joining a currency union has a positive impact on a country’s financial system development requires further investigation. This study evaluates the impact of euro adoption on Slovakia’s financial system development using a synthetic control method with lasso regularization methodology. A comprehensive index that captures the depth, access, and efficiency of financial institutions and markets is used to measure financial system development. Based on a donor pool composed of non-euro OECD countries, the …

The Effect Of Wage Proposals On Efficiency And Income Distribution☆, Lara Ezquerra, Joaquín Gómez-Miñambres, Natalia Jiminez, Praveen Kujal

ESI Publications

Pre-play non-binding communication in organizations is prevalent. We study the implications of pre-play, private and public, wage proposals in labor markets. To that end, we develop a theoretical model from which we derive certain hypothesis that we test through a laboratory experiment. In the baseline, that depicts a typical labor market interaction, the employer makes a wage offer to the worker who may then accept or reject it. In subsequent treatments, workers, moving first, make private, non-binding, wage proposals to the employer. In a following treatment, the proposals are made public. Our findings suggest that both private and public wage …

Suggested Versus Extended Gifts: How Alternative Market Institutions Mitigate Moral Hazard, Daniel Houser, Jason Shachat, Weiwei Zheng

ESI Working Papers

Gift exchange can partially mitigate supply-side moral hazard, even in anonymous market interactions. In a market where quality is not fully contractable, the amount that a price exceeds the market-clearing price for the lowest quality is a gift from the buyer. We show that the gift formation process, inextricably linked with a market institution’s price formation process, greatly influences the size and effectiveness of the gift. When the market institution dictates that prices are formed by bids posted by buyers, the gift is extended to the seller. When the market institution dictates that prices are formed by offers posted by …

Match Stability With A Costly And Flexible Number Of Positions, James Gilmore, David Porter

ESI Working Papers

One of the objectives of two-sided matching mechanisms is to pair two groups of agents such that there is no incentive for pair deviation. The outcome of a match can significantly impact participants. While much of the existing research in this field addresses the matching with fixed quotas, this is not always applicable. We introduce the concept of slot stability, recognizing the potential motivation for organizations to modify their quotas after the match. We propose an algorithm designed to create stable and slot stable matches by employing flexible, endogenous quotas to address this issue.

Religion And Growth, Sascha O. Becker, Jared Rubin, Ludger Woessmann

ESI Working Papers

We use the elements of a macroeconomic production function—physical capital, human capital, labor, and technology—together with standard growth models to frame the role of religion in economic growth. Unifying a growing literature, we argue that religion can enhance or impinge upon economic growth through all four elements because it shapes individual preferences, societal norms, and institutions. Religion affects physical capital accumulation by influencing thrift and financial development. It affects human capital through both religious and secular education. It affects population and labor by influencing work effort, fertility, and the demographic transition. And it affects total factor productivity by constraining or …

Selection Homophily And Peer Influence For Adolescents’ Smoking And Vaping Norms And Outcomes In High And Middle-Income Settings, Jennifer M. Murray, Sharon Sánchez-Franco, Olga L. Sarmiento, Erik O. Kimbrough, Christopher Tate, Shannon C. Montgomery, Rajnish Kumar, Laura Dunne, Abhijit Ramalingam, Erin L. Krupka, Felipe Montes, Huiyu Zhou, Laurence Moore, Linda Bauld, Blanca Llorente, Frank Kee, Ruth F. Hunter

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

The MECHANISMS study investigates how social norms for adolescent smoking and vaping are transmitted through school friendship networks, and is the first study to use behavioral economics methodology to assess smoking-related social norms. Here, we investigate the effects of selection homophily (the tendency to form friendships with similar peers) and peer influence (a social process whereby an individual’s behavior or attitudes are affected by peers acting as reference points for the individual) on experimentally measured smoking and vaping norms, and other smoking outcomes, in adolescents from high and middle-income settings. Full school year groups in six secondary schools in Northern …

The Impact Of Vaccinations And Chronic Disease On Covid Death Rates, James L. Doti

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

This study presents a theoretical and empirical regression model to measure the efficacy of vaccinations in reducing COVID death rates across states over the 3/10/21 to 12/28/22 period. During that period, it was estimated that the availability of vaccinations resulted in a reduction of 427,000 COVID deaths in the nation. To arrive at that estimate, other covariants were held constant. In particular, it was found that chronic disease should be included as an explanatory variable to arrive at unbiased measures of the efficacy of vaccinations in reducing deaths. In addition, the percentage of people over the age of 65 was …

Metapopulation Dynamics Of Sars-Cov-2 Transmission In A Small-Scale Amazonian Society, Thomas Kraft, Edmond Seabright, Sarah Alami, Samuel M. Jenness, Paul L. Hooper, Bret Beheim, Helen Davis, Daniel K. Cummings, Daniel Eid Rodriguez, Maguin Gutierrez Cayuba, Emily J. Miner, Xavier De Lamballerie, Lucia Inchauste, Stéphane Priet, Benjamin Trumble, Jonathan Stieglitz, Hillard Kaplan, Michael Gurven

ESI Publications

The severity of infectious disease outbreaks is governed by patterns of human contact, which vary by geography, social organization, mobility, access to technology and healthcare, economic development, and culture. Whereas globalized societies and urban centers exhibit characteristics that can heighten vulnerability to pandemics, small-scale subsistence societies occupying remote, rural areas may be buffered. Accordingly, voluntary collective isolation has been proposed as one strategy to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19 and other pandemics on small-scale Indigenous populations with minimal access to healthcare infrastructure. To assess the vulnerability of such populations and the viability of interventions such as voluntary collective isolation, we …

Apolipoprotein-Ε4 Is Associated With Higher Fecundity In A Natural Fertility Population, Benjamin Trumble, Mia Charifson, Tom Kraft, Angela R. Garcia, Daniel K. Cummings, Paul L. Hooper, Amanda J. Lea, Daniel Eid Rodriguez, Stephanie V. Koebele, Kenneth Buetow, Bret Beheim, Riana Minocher, Maguin Gutierrez, Gregory S. Thomas, Margaret Gatz, Jonathan Stieglitz, Caleb E. Finch, Hillard Kaplan, Michael Gurven

ESI Publications

In many populations, the apolipoprotein-ε4 (APOE-ε4) allele increases the risk for several chronic diseases of aging, including dementia and cardiovascular disease; despite these harmful effects at later ages, the APOE-ε4 allele remains prevalent. We assess the impact of APOE-ε4 on fertility and its proximate determinants (age at first reproduction, interbirth interval) among the Tsimane, a natural fertility population of forager-horticulturalists. Among 795 women aged 13 to 90 (20% APOE-ε4 carriers), those with at least one APOE-ε4 allele had 0.3 to 0.5 more children than (ε3/ε3) …

Group Identity And The Formation Of Conditional Social Preferences Among Chinese Youth, Timo Heinrich, Jason Shachat, Qinjuan Wan

ESI Working Papers

Con icts between local and migrant populations have been ubiquitous in modern China. We examine the potential for longer-term amelioration of this conflict through successive generations and intergroup contact within integrated schooling. We adopt the perspective that in- and out-group biased behaviour structurally arises from group conditional social preferences. We assess the group-conditional social preferences of local and migrant children in a second-tier Chinese city, Xiamen, and the extent these preferences correlate with those of their parents. We find that local students have a greater likelihood of Egalitarian preferences and a lower likelihood of Generous preferences when allocating with locals …

Energetic Costs Of Testosterone In Two Subsistence Populations, Benjamin C. Trumble, Herman Pontzer, Jonathan Stieglitz, Daniel K. Cummings, Brian Wood, Melissa Emery Thompson, David Raichlen, Bret Beheim, Gandhi Yetish, Hillard Kaplan, Michael Gurven

ESI Publications

Objective

Testosterone plays a role in mediating energetic trade-offs between growth, maintenance, and reproduction. Investments in a high testosterone phenotype trade-off against other functions, particularly survival-enhancing immune function and cellular repair; thus only individuals in good condition can maintain both a high testosterone phenotype and somatic maintenance. While these effects are observed in experimental manipulations, they are difficult to demonstrate in free-living animals, particularly in humans. We hypothesize that individuals with higher testosterone will have higher energetic expenditures than those with lower testosterone.

Methods

Total energetic expenditure (TEE) was quantified using doubly labeled water in n = 40 Tsimane forager-horticulturalists …

Discrete Rule Learning In First Price Auctions, Jason Shachat, Lijia Wei

ESI Working Papers

We present a hidden Markov model of discrete strategic heterogeneity and learning in first price independent private values auctions. The model includes three latent bidding rules: constant absolute mark-up, constant percentage mark-up, and strategic best response. Rule switching probabilities depend upon a bidder's past auction outcomes and a myopic reinforcement learning dynamic. We apply this model to a new experiment that varies the number of bidders and the auction frame between forward and reverse. We find the proportion of bidders following constant absolute mark-up increases with experience, and is higher when the number of bidders is large. The primary driver …

Trust In Public Programmes And Distributive (In)Justice In Taxation, Orkhan Nadirov, Bruce Dehning

Accounting Faculty Articles and Research

In the tax psychology literature, there is a lack of empirical evidence on the degree of distributive justice in taxation. This article aims to test the relationship between trust in public programmes and distributive justice in taxation at the cross-country level. The sample consists of 47 countries. Trust in public programmes and distributive justice in taxation are measured based on data collected from Wave 7 of the World Values Survey, which took place worldwide in 2017-2022. An Ordered Probit Model was utilised for the empirical analysis. This study finds that if taxpayers support preferential organisations like the police and universities, …

Endogenous Political Legitimacy: The Tudor Roots Of England’S Constitutional Governance, Avner Greif, Jared Rubin

ESI Working Papers

This paper highlights the importance of endogenous changes in the foundations of legitimacy for political regimes. It focuses on the central role of legitimacy changes in the rise of constitutional monarchy in England. It first defines legitimacy and briefly elaborates a theoretical framework enabling a historical study of this unobservable variable. It proceeds to substantiate that the low-legitimacy, post-Reformation Tudor monarchs of the 16th century promoted Parliament to enhance their legitimacy, thereby changing the legislative process from the “Crown and Parliament” to the “Crown in Parliament” that still prevails in England.