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Behavioral Economics Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Behavioral Economics

Why Trust Out-Groups? The Role Of Punishment Under Uncertainty, Xiaofei Pan, Daniel Houser Dec 2018

Why Trust Out-Groups? The Role Of Punishment Under Uncertainty, Xiaofei Pan, Daniel Houser

Economics Faculty Journal Articles

We conducted a hidden-effort trust game, in which we assigned subjects to one of two groups. The groups, which were formed through two different group formation processes, included a “social” group that required sharing and exchange among its members, and a “non-social” group that did not. Once assigned, subjects participated in the game with members from both groups, either with or without the opportunity to punish a trustee who may have defected on them. We found that for investors in the non-social group, the opportunity to punish a trustee worked to promote trust, but only when the trustee was a …


Centrality And Cooperation In Networks, Boris Van Leeuwen, Abhijit Ramalingam, David Rojo Arjona, Arthur Schram Sep 2018

Centrality And Cooperation In Networks, Boris Van Leeuwen, Abhijit Ramalingam, David Rojo Arjona, Arthur Schram

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

We investigate the effects of centrality on cooperation in groups. Players with centrality keep a group together by having a pivotal position in a network. In some of our experimental treatments, players can vote to exclude others and prevent them from further participation in the group. We find that, in the presence of exclusion, central players contribute significantly less than others, and that this is tolerated by those others. Because of this tolerance, teams with centrality manage to maintain high levels of cooperation.


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 …


Preference Conformism: An Experiment, Enrique Fatas, Shaun P. Hargreaves Heap, David Rojo Arjona Mar 2018

Preference Conformism: An Experiment, Enrique Fatas, Shaun P. Hargreaves Heap, David Rojo Arjona

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

This paper reports on an experiment designed to test whether people’s preferences change to become more alike. Such preference conformism would be worrying for an economics that takes individual preferences as given (‘de gustibus es non disputandum’). So the test is important. But it is also difficult. People can behave alike for many reasons and the key to the design of our test, therefore, is the control of the other possible reasons for observing apparent peer effects. We find evidence of preference conformism in the aggregate and at the individual level (where there is heterogeneity). It appears also to be …


Entrepreneurship Education Empowers Youth To Change Their Lives, Marianna Brashear, Jason Riddle Mar 2018

Entrepreneurship Education Empowers Youth To Change Their Lives, Marianna Brashear, Jason Riddle

National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Conference

The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) aims at equipping Title 1 schools with free, hands-on, engaging materials that any teacher can facilitate either individually or in a classroom setting with no background in entrepreneurship necessary. These versatile lessons, courses, and workshops teach the entrepreneurial mindset optimizing opportunities for grades 8-12 students no matter which life/career path they choose.


Time Delay And Investment Decisions: Evidence From An Experiment In Tanzania, Plamen Nikolov Jan 2018

Time Delay And Investment Decisions: Evidence From An Experiment In Tanzania, Plamen Nikolov

Economics Faculty Scholarship

Attitudes toward risk underlie virtually every important economic decision an individual makes. In this experimental study, I examine how introducing a time delay into the execution of an investment plan influences individuals’ risk preferences. The field experiment proceeded in three stages: a decision stage, an execution stage and a payout stage. At the outset, in the Decision Stage (Stage 1), each subject was asked to make an investment plan by splitting a monetary investment amount between a risky asset and a safe asset. Subjects were informed that the investment plans they made in the Decision Stage are binding and will …


Wildfire Risk Perception And Homeowner Mitigation: Evidence From Montana, Madison G. Nagle Jan 2018

Wildfire Risk Perception And Homeowner Mitigation: Evidence From Montana, Madison G. Nagle

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Fire prevention managers find that homeowners often do not perform mitigation actions that could reduce the damage and spread of wildfire. There is widespread belief among these fire professionals that one of the primary reasons that homeowners do not perform mitigation actions is that homeowners misperceive the risk that wildfire poses. Thus, a significant component of fire prevention programs’ focus on increasing homeowner awareness of the risk. However, it is possible that homeowners are aware of the fire risk but choose not to mitigate because of a variety of reasons, to include the costs of mitigation, limited monetary liability that …