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Full-Text Articles in Other Economics

Do Negative Random Shocks Affect Trust And Trustworthiness?, Hernán Bejerano, Joris Gillet, Ismael Rodriguez-Lara Oct 2018

Do Negative Random Shocks Affect Trust And Trustworthiness?, Hernán Bejerano, Joris Gillet, Ismael Rodriguez-Lara

ESI Publications

We report data from a variation of the trust game aimed at determining whether (and how) inequality and random shocks that affect wealth influence the levels of trust and trustworthiness. To tease apart the effect of the shock and the inequality, we compare behavior in a trust game where the inequality is initially given and one where it is the result of a random shock that reduces the second mover's endowment. We find that first‐movers send less to second‐movers but only when the inequality results from a random shock. As for the amount returned, second‐movers return less when they are …


Do Negative Random Shocks Affect Trust And Trustworthiness?, Hernán Bejerano, Joris Gillet, Ismael Rodriguez-Lara Oct 2018

Do Negative Random Shocks Affect Trust And Trustworthiness?, Hernán Bejerano, Joris Gillet, Ismael Rodriguez-Lara

ESI Publications

We report data from a variation of the trust game aimed at determining whether (and how) inequality and random shocks that affect wealth influence the levels of trust and trustworthiness. To tease apart the effect of the shock and the inequality, we compare behavior in a trust game where the inequality is initially given and one where it is the result of a random shock that reduces the second mover's endowment. We find that first‐movers send less to second‐movers but only when the inequality results from a random shock. As for the amount returned, second‐movers return less when they are …


A Portable Method Of Eliciting Respect For Social Norms, Erik O. Kimbrough, Alexander Vostroknutov May 2018

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 …


Experimental Evidence On The Cyclicality Of Investment, Cortney S. Rodet, Andrew Smyth Feb 2018

Experimental Evidence On The Cyclicality Of Investment, Cortney S. Rodet, Andrew Smyth

ESI Working Papers

We report laboratory experiments investigating the cyclicality of investment. In our setting, optimal investment is counter-cyclical because investment costs fall following market downturns. However, we do not observe counter-cyclical investment. Instead, heuristic investment models where firms invest a fixed percentage of their liquidity, or a fixed percentage of anticipated market demand, better fit our data on average than does optimal investment. We also report a control treatment without cost changes and a treatment with asymmetric investment liquidity. Both of these extensions support our main result.


Testing The Boundaries Of The Double Auction: The Effects Of Complete Information And Market Power, Erik O. Kimbrough Jan 2018

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 …