Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

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 …

Helminth Infection, Fecundity, And Age Of First Pregnancy In Women, Aaron D. Blackwell, Marilyne D. Tamayo, Bret Beheim, Benjamin C. Trumble, Jonathan Stieglitz, Paul L. Hooper, Melanie Martin, Hillard Kaplan, Michael Gurven

ESI Publications

Infection with intestinal helminths results in immunological changes that influence the odds of comorbid infections, and might also affect fecundity by inducing immunological states supportive of conception and pregnancy. Here we investigate associations between intestinal helminths and fertility in human females, utilizing nine years of longitudinal data from 986 Bolivian forger-horticulturalists, experiencing natural fertility and a 70% helminth prevalence. We find that different species of helminth are associated with opposing effects on fecundity. Infection with roundworm (Ascaris lumbricoides) is associated with earlier first births and shortened interbirth intervals, while infection with hookworm is associated with delayed first pregnancy and extended …

Cognitive Reflection And The Diligent Worker: An Experimental Study Of Millennials, Brice Corgnet, Roberto Hernán-González, Ricardo Mateo

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

Recent studies have shown that despite crucially needing the creative talent of millennials (people born after 1980) organizations have been reluctant to hire young workers because of their supposed lack of diligence. We propose to help resolve this dilemma by studying the determinants of task performance and shirking behaviors of millennials in a laboratory work environment. We find that cognitive ability is a good predictor of task performance in line with previous literature. In contrast with previous research, personality traits do not consistently predict either task performance or shirking behaviors. Shirking behaviors, as measured by the time participants spent browsing …

Natural Sleep And Its Seasonal Variations In Three Pre-Industrial Societies, Gandhi Yetish, Hillard Kaplan, Michael Gurven, Brian Wood, Herman Pontzer, Paul R. Manger, Charles Wilson, Ronald Mcgregor, Jerome M. Siegel

ESI Publications

How did humans sleep before the modern era? Because the tools to measure sleep under natural conditions were developed long after the invention of the electric devices suspected of delaying and reducing sleep, we investigated sleep in three preindustrial societies[1–3]. We find that all three show similar sleep organization, suggesting that they express core human sleep patterns, likely characteristic of pre-modern era Homo sapiens. Sleep periods, the times from onset to offset, averaged 6.9–8.5-h, with sleep durations of 5.7–7.1-h, amounts near the low end of those industrial societies[4–7]. There was a difference of nearly 1-h between summer and winter sleep. …

Calcaneal Quantitative Ultrasound Indicates Reduced Bone Status Among Physically Active Adult Forager-Horticulturalists, Jonathan Stieglitz, Felicia C. Madimenos, Hillard Kaplan, Michael Gurven

ESI Publications

Six months of exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) is considered optimal for infant health, though globally most infants begin complementary feeding (CF) earlier—including among populations that practice prolonged breastfeeding. Two frameworks for understanding patterns of early CF emerge in the literature. In the first, maternal and infant needs trade-off, as “maternal-centric” factors—related to time and energy demands, reproductive investment, cultural influences, and structural barriers— favor supplanting breastfeeding with earlier and increased CF. A second framework considers that “infant-centric” factors—related to infant energetic needs—favor CF before six months to supplement breastfeeding.

We apply these two frameworks in examining early CF among the Tsimane—a …

Tug-Of-War In The Laboratory, Cary Deck, Roman M. Sheremeta

ESI Working Papers

Tug-of-war is a multi-battle contest often used to describe extended interactions in economics, management, political science, and other disciplines. While there has been some theoretical work, there is scant empirical evidence regarding behavior in a tug-of-war game. To the best of our knowledge, this paper provides the first experimental study of the tug-of-war. The results show notable deviations of behavior from theory. In the first battle of the tug-of-war, subjects exert fewer resources, while in the follow-up battles, they exert more resources than predicted. Also, contrary to the theoretical prediction, resource expenditures tend to increase in the duration of the …

Building A Better Model: Variable Selection To Predict Poverty In Pakistan And Sri Lanka, Marium Afzal, Jonathan Hersh, David Newhouse

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

Numerous studies have developed models to predict poverty, but surprisingly few have rigorously examined different approaches to developing prediction models. This paper applies out of sample validation techniques to household data from Pakistan and Sri Lanka, to compare the accuracy of regional poverty predictions from models derived using manual selection, stepwise regression, and Lasso-based procedures. It also examines how much incorporating publically available satellite data into the model improves its accuracy. The five main findings are that: 1) Lasso tends to outperform both discretionary and stepwise models in Pakistan, where the set of potential predictors is large. 2) Lasso and …

Adam Smith: Homo Socialis, Yes; Social Preferences, No; Reciprocity Was To Be Explained, Vernon L. Smith

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

I argue that the authors accept too casually the neo-classical framework of thought that was incapable of predicting choices in 2-person and other experimental games in the 1980s and 1990ss. The ex post hoc hypothesis that social preference can describe homo socialis reduces inevitably to a rescue of neo-classical economics in which Max-U (own payoff, other payoff) substitutes mechanically for Max-U (own payoff) in our personal groupings. This static procedure unnecessarily and inappropriately robs human conduct of its sociality as a process relationship. The model I articulate was masterfully developed by Adam Smith, which back-predicts the results of these earlier …

Does Market Integration Buffer Risk, Erode Traditional Sharing Practices And Increase Inequality? A Test Among Bolivian Forager-Farmers, Michael Gurven, Adrian V. Jaeggi, Christopher Von Rueden, Paul L. Hooper, Hillard Kaplan

ESI Publications

Sharing and exchange are common practices for minimizing food insecurity in rural populations. The advent of markets and monetization in egalitarian indigenous populations presents an alternative means of managing risk, with the potential impact of eroding traditional networks. We test whether market involvement buffers several types of risk and reduces traditional sharing behavior among Tsimane Amerindians of the Bolivian Amazon. Results vary based on type of market integration and scale of analysis (household vs. village), consistent with the notion that local culture and ecology shape risk management strategies. Greater wealth and income were unassociated with the reliance on others for …

European Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee (Esfrc) (2015) : Escalating Crisis In The Eurozone: The Case For Conditional Debt Relief For Greece (Statement No. 40), David Veredas, Niels Thygesen, Tom Berglund, Reinhard H. Schmidt, Franco Bruni, Harald Benink, Kern Alexander, Santiago Carbo-Valverde, Rosa Lastra, Clas Wihlborg

Business Faculty Articles and Research

In this statement the European Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee (ESFRC) is advocating a conditional relief of Greek's government debt based on Greece meeting certain targets for structural economic reforms in areas such as its labor market and pensions sector. The authors argue that the position of the European institutions that debt relief for Greece cannot be part of an agreement is based on the illusion that Greece will be able to service its sovereign debt and reduce its debt overhang after implementing a set of fiscal and structural reforms. However, the Greek economy would need to grow at an unrealistic …

Depression As Sickness Behavior? A Test Of The Host Defense Hypothesis In A High Pathogen Population, Jonathan Stieglitz, Benjamin C. Trumble, Melissa Emery Thompson, Aaron D. Blackwell, Hillard Kaplan, Michael Gurven

ESI Publications

Sadness is an emotion universally recognized across cultures, suggesting it plays an important functional role in regulating human behavior. Numerous adaptive explanations of persistent sadness interfering with daily functioning (hereafter “depression”) have been proposed, but most do not explain frequent bidirectional associations between depression and greater immune activation. Here we test several predictions of the host defense hypothesis, which posits that depression is part of a broader coordinated evolved response to infection or tissue injury (i.e. “sickness behavior”) that promotes energy conservation and reallocation to facilitate immune activation. In a high pathogen population of lean and relatively egalitarian Bolivian foragerhorticulturalists, …

Public Goods With Punishment & Payment For Relative Rank, Terence C. Burnham

ESI Working Papers

A laboratory experiment designed to investigate the role of relative performance-based payoffs on cooperation in the context of punishment. Subjects play a repeated public goods game with high-powered punishment (50:1) and additional payoffs based on relative performance. Contributions to the public good are nearly maximal. Punishment levels are substantial, higher than the same game without relative rank payoffs, and sufficiently high that total payoffs are negative. The group would make much more money in the same setting without punishment. This study contributes to investigation of the role of altruism in human cooperation.

Economic Voting: Election Outcomes At The Toss Of A Coin?, Damaris Bangean

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Given the severe shock of the 2008 economic crisis, this paper examines the relationship the relationship between individual and aggregate economic evaluations and democratic accountability through data analysis of the 2012 American National Election Studies. It includes statistical analysis of presidential and congressional approval, personal restrospective and prospective economic evaluations, macroeconomic restrospective and prospective evaluations, and other relevant variables, such as income and ideological preferences to broaden the scope of analysis on political behavior. As the notion of democratic accountability is a foundational pillar of the American political system, such studies are critical to election years following economic fluctuations, where …

Support For Welfare, Matthew Reminick

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Although there is much debate over the effectiveness of social programs, there has not been much research attempting to discover who exactly supports spending government resources on welfare. Previous research suggests that the American people are divided over creating a welfare state. Many economic data shows that providing assistance is beneficial short-term, but can have varying effects in the future. The research I conducted attempts to define and analyze welfare while surmising which groups of Americans are most likely to back increased federal spending towards welfare. Using the ANES 2012 data, I evaluated voter responses to election surveys, paying close …

Air Pollution Differences Between Nations With Different Economic Profiles, Alliyah Sato

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The economics of a country plays an important role in determining what that country considers as its priorities. A developed country, such as the U.S., is powerful economically. As a result, it has the resources and tools to focus on other aspects of the nation. One of these features is the environment. Countries undergoing urbanization and industrial development processes, such as China, are emitting large amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere. Although it has adverse health and ecological effects, China has shown very little reduction of its emissions from 2000-2014. It relies heavily on coal burning as a source of …

Firing Threats: Incentive Effects And Impression Management, Brice Corgnet, Roberto Hérnan-Gonzalez, Stephen J. Rassenti

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

We study the effect of firing threats in a virtual workplace that reproduces features of existing organizations. We show that organizations in which bosses can fire up to one third of their workforce produce twice as much as organizations for which firing is not possible. Firing threats sharply decrease on-the-job leisure. Nevertheless, organizations endowed with firing threats underperformed those using individual incentives. In the presence of firing threats, employees engage in impression management activities to be seen as hard-working individuals in line with our model. Finally, production levels dropped substantially when the threat of being fired was removed, whereas on-the-job …

Robust Determinants Of Bilateral Trade, Marianne Baxter, Jonathan Hersh

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

What are the policies and country-level conditions which best explain bilateral trade flows between countries? As databases expand, an increasing number of possible explanatory variables are proposed that influence bilateral trade without a clear indication of which variables are robustly important across contexts, time periods, and which are not sensitive to inclusion of other control variables. To shed light on this problem, we apply three model selection methods – Lasso reguarlized regression, Bayesian Model Averaging, and Extreme Bound Analysis -- to candidate variables in a gravity models of trade. Using a panel of 198 countries covering the years 1970 to …

Inclusive Fitness And Differential Productivity Across The Life Course Determine Intergenerational Transfers In A Small-Scale Human Society, Paul L. Hooper, Michael Gurven, Jeffrey Winking, Hillard Kaplan

ESI Publications

Transfers of resources between generations are an essential element in current models of human life-history evolution accounting for prolonged development, extended lifespan and menopause. Integrating these models with Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness, we predict that the interaction of biological kinship with the age-schedule of resource production should be a key driver of intergenerational transfers. In the empirical case of Tsimane’ forager–horticulturalists in Bolivian Amazonia, we provide a detailed characterization of net transfers of food according to age, sex, kinship and the net need of donors and recipients. We show that parents, grandparents and siblings provide significant net downward transfers …

Conflicted Emotions Following Trust-Based Interaction, Eric Schniter, Roman M. Sheremeta, Timothy W. Shields

ESI Publications

We observed reports of conflicted (concurrent positive and negative) emotions activated after interactions in the Trust game. Our analyses reveal that activation of 20 emotional states following trust-based interaction is better explained by predictions derived from a multi-dimensional Recalibrational perspective than by predictions derived from two-dimensional Valence and Arousal perspectives. The Recalibrational perspective proposes that emotions are activated according to their functional features – for example, emotions help people achieve short or long-sighted goals by up or down-regulating behavioral propensities, whereas Valence and Arousal perspectives consider simpler hedonic dimensions lacking functional specificity. The Recalibrational perspective is also distinguished from the …

The Effect Of Earned Vs. House Money On Price Bubble Formation In Experimental Asset Markets, Brice Corgnet, Roberto Hernán González, Praveen Kujal, David Porter

ESI Publications

Does house money exacerbate price bubbles? We compare house money asset market experiments with an earned money treatment where initial portfolios are constructed from a real effort task. Bubbles occur; however, trading volumes and earnings dispersion are significantly higher with house money. We investigate the role of cognitive ability in accounting for the differences in earnings distribution across treatments by using the cognitive reflection test (CRT). Low CRT subjects earned less than high CRT subjects. Low CRT subjects were net purchasers (sellers) of shares when the price was above (below) fundamental value. The opposite was true for high CRT subjects.

Sustaining Group Reputation, Erik O. Kimbrough, Jared Rubin

ESI Publications

When individuals trade with strangers, there is a temptation to renege on agreements. If repeated interaction or exogenous enforcement is unavailable, societies often solve this problem via institutions that rely on group, rather than individual, reputation. Groups can employ two mechanisms to uphold reputation that are unavailable to individuals: information sharing and in-group punishment. We design a laboratory experiment to distinguish the roles of these mechanisms when individual reputations are unobservable. Subjects are split into groups and play a trust game with random re-matching, where only the group identity of one’s partner is known. Treatments differ by whether information about …

Disfluent Fonts Don’T Help People Solve Math Problems, Andrew Meyer, Shane Frederick, Terence C. Burnham, Juan D. Guevera Pinto, Ty W. Boyer, Linden J. Ball, Gordon Pennycook, Rakefet Ackerman, Valerie A. Thompson, Jonathon P. Schuldt

ESI Publications

Prior research suggests that reducing font clarity can cause people to consider printed information more carefully. The most famous demonstration showed that participants were more likely to solve counterintuitive math problems when they were printed in hard-to-read font. However, after pooling data from that experiment with 16 attempts to replicate it, we find no effect on solution rates. We examine potential moderating variables, including cognitive ability, presentation format, and experimental setting, but we find no evidence of a disfluent font benefit under any conditions. More generally, though disfluent fonts slightly increase response times, we find little evidence that they activate …

Firing Threats And Tenure In Virtual Organizations: Incentives Effects And Impression Management, Brice Corgnet, Roberto Hernán González, Stephen Rassenti

ESI Publications

We study the effect of firing threats in a virtual workplace that reproduces features of existing organizations. We show that organizations in which bosses can fire up to one third of their workforce produce twice as much as organizations for which firing is not possible. Firing threats sharply decrease on-the-job leisure. Nevertheless, organizations endowed with firing threats underperformed those using individual incentives. In the presence of firing threats, employees engage in impression management activities to be seen as hard-working individuals in line with our model. Finally, production levels dropped substantially when the threat of being fired was removed, whereas on-the-job …

Peer Pressure And Moral Hazard In Teams: Experimental Evidence, Brice Corgnet, Roberto Hernán-González, Stephen Rassenti

ESI Publications

Team incentives have been found to be particularly effective both in the lab and in the field despite the moral hazard in teams problem identified by Holmström (1982). In a newly developed virtual workplace, we show that, in line with Holmström, moral hazard in teams is indeed pervasive. Subsequently, we find strong evidence for the conjecture of Kandel and Lazear (1992) that peer pressure may resolve the moral hazard in teams problem. Organizations equipped with a very weak form of peer monitoring (anonymous and without physical proximity, verbal threats or face-to-face interactions) perform as well as those using individual incentives.

The Cognitive Basis Of Social Behavior: Cognitive Reflection Overrides Antisocial But Not Always Prosocial Motives, Brice Corgnet, Antonio M. Espín, Roberto Hérnan-Gonzalez

ESI Working Papers

Even though human social behavior has received considerable scientific attention in the last decades, its cognitive underpinnings are still poorly understood. Applying a dual-process framework to the study of social preferences, we show in two studies that individuals with a more reflective/deliberative cognitive style, as measured by scores on the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), are more likely to make choices consistent with “mild” altruism in simple non-strategic decisions. Such choices increase social welfare by increasing the other person’s payoff at very low or no cost for the individual. The choices of less reflective individuals (i.e. those who rely more heavily …

Generalizations Of The General Lotto And Colonel Blotto Games, Dan Kovenock, Brian Roberson

ESI Working Papers

In this paper, we generalize the General Lotto game (budget constraints satisfied in expectation) and the Colonel Blotto game (budget constraints hold with probability one) to allow for battlefield valuations that are heterogeneous across battlefields and asymmetric across players, and for the players to have asymmetric resource constraints. We completely characterize Nash equilibrium in the generalized version of the General Lotto game and then show how this characterization can be applied to identify equilibria in the Colonel Blotto version of the game. In both games, we find that there exist sets of non-pathological parameter configurations of positive Lebesgue measure with …

Performance Benefits Of Reward Choice: A Procedural Justice Perspective, Arran Caza, Matthew W. Mccarter, Gregory B. Northcraft

ESI Publications

Reward choice – employees' ability to exercise control over the formal rewards they receive from work – is an important part of many HRM strategies. Reward choice is expected to increase employee performance, but conflicting findings highlight the need to better understand how and when it will do so. Based on fairness heuristic theory, we predicted that procedural justice mediates reward choice's influence on performance, and that choice attractiveness moderates that influence. A field study and an experiment both had similar results, supporting our predictions. Reward choice can increase performance by as much as 40 per cent, but only when …

Humankind In Civilization’S Extended Order: A Tragedy, The First Part, Bart J. Wilson

ESI Publications

This article is a short, scientific story of the labyrinthian human career, of humankind’s place in the natural order of the world, and of the evolution of moral rules and rule following that make the extended order of civilization possible. Drawing upon work in anthropology, biology, and linguistics, I weave a science-based narrative of how Homo sapiens came to be the only primate to convert enemy aliens into trading friends. It is a Goethean story of the human condition that postulates the common origins of and modern tension between Pleistocene and Anthropocene morality. It is also a Hayekian story of …

Conduct In Narrativized Trust Games, Jan Osborn, Bart J. Wilson, Bradley R. Sherwood

English Faculty Articles and Research

We “narrativize” a basic extensive form trust game by placing participants in a story that contextualizes the interaction with an unforeseeable future. In our narrative experiment, participants consider each decision as a character, advancing the story with their choices for salient payoffs. Our interest is in understanding how participants apply Adam Smith's rules of beneficent and just conduct in our narrativized games with epistemic conditions of an unknown future, conditions which aren't possible in extensive form. We invite our readers to participate in the story of the results, making meaning as participants in a narrative that unfolds with their choices.

Revisiting The Tradeoff Between Risk And Incentives: The Shocking Effect Of Random Shocks, Brice Corgnet, Roberto Hérnan-Gonzalez

ESI Working Papers

Despite its central role in the theory of incentives, empirical evidence of a tradeoff between risk and incentives remains scarce. We reexamine this empirical puzzle in a controlled laboratory environment so as to isolate possible confounding factors encountered in the field. In line with the principal-agent model, we find that principals increase fixed pay while lowering performance pay when the relationship between effort and output is noisier. Unexpectedly, agents produce substantially more in the noisy environment than in the baseline despite lesser pay for performance. We show that this result can be accounted for by introducing agents’ loss aversion in …