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A Portable Method Of Eliciting Respect For Social Norms, Erik O. Kimbrough, Alexander Vostroknutov
A Portable Method Of Eliciting Respect For Social Norms, Erik O. Kimbrough, Alexander Vostroknutov
Economics Faculty Articles and Research
Recent models of prosociality suggest that cooperation in laboratory games may be better understood as resulting from concern for social norms than from prosocial preferences over outcomes. Underlying this interpretation is the idea that people exhibit heterogeneous respect for shared norms. We introduce a new, abstract task to elicit a proxy for individual norm-following propensity by asking subjects to choose from two actions, where one is costly. We instruct subjects that “the rule is” to take the costly action. Their willingness to incur such a cost reveals respect for norms. We show that choices in this task are similar across …
Testing The Boundaries Of The Double Auction: The Effects Of Complete Information And Market Power, Erik O. Kimbrough
Testing The Boundaries Of The Double Auction: The Effects Of Complete Information And Market Power, Erik O. Kimbrough
Economics Faculty Articles and Research
We report boundary experiments testing the robustness of price convergence in double auction markets for non-durable goods in which there is extreme earnings inequality at the competitive equilibrium (CE). Following up on a conjecture by Smith (1976a), we test whether the well-known equilibrating power of the double auction institution is robust to the presence of complete information about traders’ values and costs and the presence of symmetric market power. We find that complete information is insufficient to impede convergence to CE prices; however, introducing market power consistently causes prices to deviate from the CE, whether or not subjects possess complete …