Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Conservatism Principle And Asymmetric Preferences Over Reporting Errors, Jivas Chakravarthy, Timothy W. Shields

ESI Working Papers

At present, accounting conservatism is generally viewed from a measurement or reporting perspective. In contrast, we consider whether it relates to a moral rule of conduct. Conservatism has been described as deriving from a preference for reporting errors to be in the direction of understatement rather than overstatement. We experimentally pair Reporters who provide information with Users who rely on the information. We posit that under misaligned incentives that motivate aggressive reporting, Users view an aggressive report as reflecting Reporters’ exploitative intent and expect that a social norm prohibiting aggressive reporting applies. We predict that Users use noisy reporting errors …

A Simple, Ecologically Rational Rule For Settling Found Property Disputes, Bart J. Wilson

ESI Publications

Who has property in a found item X, which is contained in Y? The finder of X or the person who has property in Y? The common law says it depends. It depends upon whether the owner of Y knew about X, or whether X was lost or mislaid, or how small the weight of X is relative to Y (as compared to its value), or whether the finder was an employee of the owner of Y, to name just a few. Wilson (2020) hypothesizes that humans universally cognize property as being contained in a …

Three Essays On Behavioral Economics And Mechanism Design, Na Zuo

Doctoral Dissertations

My three essays on behavioral economics and mechanism design introduce two new microeconomic theoretical models.

In the first chapter, we develop an n-player theoretical model applying the concept of Virtual Bargaining to study cooperative behavior in public goods games characterizing team production. Virtual Bargaining is a modeling framework that characterizes how players may construct a tacit agreement to coordinate behavior in the absence of explicit communication. Players identify their worst-possible payoff outcome from any candidate agreement, and mutually best-respond with respect to maximization of their worst-payoff function. Players face uncertainties regarding whether other players will follow through on a candidate …

Data For "Consistent Differences In A Virtual World Model Of Ape Societies", Bart J. Wilson, Sarah F. Brosnan, Elizabeth V. Lonsdorf, Crickette M. Sanz

Business and Economics Faculty Data Sets

The zip file contains the data for the paper entitled "Consistent Differences in a Virtual World Model of Ape Societies" which appears in Scientific Reports.

Competitive Blind Spots And The Cyclicality Of Investment: Experimental Evidence, Cortney S. Rodent, Andrew Smyth

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

We report laboratory experiments investigating the cyclicality of profit‐enhancing investment in a competitive environment. In our setting, optimal investment is counter‐cyclical when investment costs fall following market downturns. However, we do not observe counter‐cyclical investment. Instead, we see much less strategic behavior than our rational investment model anticipates. Our participants exhibit what Porter (1980) terms a competitive blind spot, and heuristic investment models where individuals invest a fixed percentage of their liquidity, or a fixed percentage of anticipated market demand, better fit our data than does optimal investment. We also report a control treatment without cost changes and a treatment …

Trust And Trustworthiness After Negative Random Shocks, Hernán Bejerano, Joris Gillet, Ismael Rodriguez-Lara

ESI Working Papers

We investigate experimentally the effect of a negative endowment shock in a trust game to assess whether different causes of inequality have different effects on trust and trustworthiness. In our trust game there may be inequality in favor of the second mover and this may (or may not) be the result of a negative random shock (i.e., the outcome of a die roll) that decreases the endowment of the first-mover. Our findings suggest that inequality leads to differences in behavior. First-movers send more of their endowment and second-movers return more when there is inequality. However, we do not find support …

An Experiment On The Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. Causes And Impact On Inequality, Antonio J. Morales, Ismael Rodriguez-Lara

ESI Working Papers

Testing causal relationships expressed by mathematical models on facts about human behaviour across history is challenging. A prominent example is the Neolithic agricultural revolution [1]. Many theoretical models of the adoption of agriculture has been put forward [2] but none has been tested. The only exception is [3], that uses a computational approach with agent-based simulations of evolutionary games. Here, we propose two games that resemble the conditions of human societies before and after the agricultural revolution. The agricultural revolution is modelled as an exogenous shock in the lab (n=180, 60 independent groups), and the transition from foraging to farming …

A Computational And Experimental Examination Of The Fcc Incentive Auction, Logan Gantner

Computational and Data Sciences (PhD) Dissertations

In 2016, the Federal Communications Commission debuted a new auction mechanism, the Incentive Auction, with the intention of obtaining high frequency television broadcasting spectrum, repurposing it for cellular use, and reselling these licenses at profitable prices. In designing this process, the traditional mechanism used for spectrum auctions, the Simulta- neous Multiple Round Auction (SMR), was modified in order to speed the process. This new mechanism, the Incentive Forward Auction (IFA), intended to reduce the number of rounds per auction by lumping similar spectrum licenses together. However, the IFA discourages straightforward bidding strategies and can result in bidders committing more in …