Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
- Keyword
-
- Experiments (32)
- Experiment (23)
- Experimental economics (18)
- Cooperation (14)
- Laboratory Experiments (10)
-
- Trust (10)
- Beliefs (9)
- Contest (9)
- Coordination (9)
- Institutions (9)
- Laboratory experiments (9)
- All-pay auction (8)
- Conflict (8)
- Laboratory experiment (8)
- Social norms (8)
- Endogenous institutions (7)
- Religion (7)
- Repeated games (7)
- Social dilemmas (7)
- Experimental asset markets (6)
- Matching (6)
- Social preferences (6)
- Colonel Blotto (5)
- Conflict resolution (5)
- Contests (5)
- Money (5)
- Networks (5)
- Trust game (5)
- Competition (4)
- Culture (4)
Articles 121 - 150 of 315
Full-Text Articles in Econometrics
The Economics Of Babysitting A Robot, Aleksandr Alekseev
The Economics Of Babysitting A Robot, Aleksandr Alekseev
ESI Working Papers
I study the welfare effect of automation on workers in a setting where technology is complementary but imperfect. Using a modified task-based framework, I argue that imperfect complementary automation can impose non-pecuniary costs on workers via a behavioral channel. The theoretical model suggests that a critical factor determining the welfare effect of imperfect complementary automation is the automatability of the production process. I confirm the model's predictions in an experiment that elicits subjects' revealed preference for automation. Increasing automatability leads to a significant increase in the demand for automation. I explore additional drivers of the demand for automation using machine …
Public Leaderboard Feedback In Sampling Competition: An Experimental Investigation, Stanton Hudja, Brian Roberson, Yaroslav Rosokha
Public Leaderboard Feedback In Sampling Competition: An Experimental Investigation, Stanton Hudja, Brian Roberson, Yaroslav Rosokha
ESI Working Papers
We investigate the role of performance feedback, in the form of a public leaderboard, in a sequential-sampling contest with costly observations. The player whose sequential random sample contains the observation with the highest value wins the contest and obtains a prize with a fixed value. We find that there exist parameter configurations such that in the subgame perfect equilibrium of contests with a fixed ending date (i.e., finite horizon), providing public performance feedback results in fewer expected observations and a lower expected value of the winning observation. We conduct a controlled laboratory experiment to test the theoretical predictions, and find …
Forecasting Skills In Experimental Markets: Illusion Or Reality?, Brice Corgnet, Cary Deck, Mark Desantis, David Porter
Forecasting Skills In Experimental Markets: Illusion Or Reality?, Brice Corgnet, Cary Deck, Mark Desantis, David Porter
ESI Working Papers
Using experimental asset markets, we study the situation of a financial analyst who is trying to infer the fundamental value of an asset by observing the market’s history. We find that such capacity requires both standard cognitive skills (IQ) as well as social and emotional skills. However, forecasters with high emotional skills tend to perform worse when market mispricing is high as they tend to give too much emphasis to the noisy signals from market data. By contrast, forecasters with high social skills perform especially well in markets with high levels of mispricing in which their skills could help them …
Trust, Reciprocity, And Social History: New Pathways Of Learning When Max U (Own Reward) Fails Decisively, Vernon L. Smith
Trust, Reciprocity, And Social History: New Pathways Of Learning When Max U (Own Reward) Fails Decisively, Vernon L. Smith
ESI Working Papers
"This evaluation begins with the BDM protocol—itself a methodological contribution—and the experimental findings. The question of the replicability and robustness of these unexpected results is addressed next in a summary of two subsequent experimental papers. We follow with a discussion of two attempts to explain qua understand the BDM findings; both, however, have methological deficiencies—Reciprocity and Social Preference explanations. Finally, we offer a brief on Adam Smith’s (1759; 1853; hereafter in the text, Sentiments) model of human sociability, based on strictly self-interested actors, that culminates in propositions that (1) account for trust game choices, and (2) predict action in new …
Strategic Problems With Risky Prospects, Alessandro Sontuoso, Cristina Bicchieri, Alexander Funcke, Einav Hart
Strategic Problems With Risky Prospects, Alessandro Sontuoso, Cristina Bicchieri, Alexander Funcke, Einav Hart
ESI Working Papers
We study “hypothetical reasoning” in games where the impact of risky prospects (chance moves with commonly-known conditional probabilities) is compounded by strategic uncertainty. We embed such games in an environment that permits us to verify if risk-taking behavior is affected by information that reduces the extent of strategic uncertainty. We then test some implications of expected utility theory, while making minimal assumptions about individuals’ (risk or ambiguity) attitudes. Results indicate an effect of the information on behavior: this effect is triggered in some cases by a belief-revision about others’ actions, and in other cases by a reversal in risk …
Inequality In Foraging And Farming Societies: An Experimental Approach, Antonio J. Morales, Ismael Rodriguez-Lara
Inequality In Foraging And Farming Societies: An Experimental Approach, Antonio J. Morales, Ismael Rodriguez-Lara
ESI Working Papers
We propose two games that resemble the conditions of human societies before and after the Neolithic agricultural revolution to test the hypothesis that the modes of production affected the level of inequality. We replicate the findings that foraging societies organized themselves around social division of labour and were more egalitarian than farming societies. We also find evidence that i) the transition from foraging to farming societies was heterogeneous, with groups that quickly adopted the agricultural practice and others that never experienced it, and ii) inequality in farming societies increases as agriculture settles. Our experimental data further suggest that the transition …
Religion In Economic History: A Survey, Sascha O. Becker, Jared Rubin, Ludger Woessmann
Religion In Economic History: A Survey, Sascha O. Becker, Jared Rubin, Ludger Woessmann
ESI Working Papers
This chapter surveys the recent social science literature on religion in economic history, covering both socioeconomic causes and consequences of religion. Following the rapidly growing literature, it focuses on the three main monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and on the period up to WWII. Works on Judaism address Jewish occupational specialization, human capital, emancipation, and the causes and consequences of Jewish persecution. One set of papers on Christianity studies the role of the Catholic Church in European economic history since the medieval period. Taking advantage of newly digitized data and advanced econometric techniques, the voluminous literature on the Protestant Reformation studies its …
Trade Facilitation And Tariff Evasion, Cosimo Beverelli, Rohit Ticku
Trade Facilitation And Tariff Evasion, Cosimo Beverelli, Rohit Ticku
ESI Working Papers
This paper investigates the extent to which trade facilitation measures included in the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement affect tariff evasion. In a dataset covering 121 countries and the whole set of HS6 product categories in 2012, 2015, and 2017, the paper shows that trade facilitation measures that improve legal certainty for traders moderate tariff evasion. Holding tariff rate constant at its mean, one standard deviation improvement in trade facilitation measures related to legal certainty reduces tariff evasion, as measured by missing imports in trade statistics, by almost 12%. In a counterfactual with full trade liberalization, countries with higher scores on …
Trust And Trustworthiness After Negative Random Shocks, Hernán Bejarano, Joris Gillet, Ismael Rodriguez-Lara
Trust And Trustworthiness After Negative Random Shocks, Hernán Bejarano, 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 …
Shutdown Policies And Worldwide Conflict, Nicolas Berman, Mathieu Couttenier, Nathalie Monnet, Rohit Ticku
Shutdown Policies And Worldwide Conflict, Nicolas Berman, Mathieu Couttenier, Nathalie Monnet, Rohit Ticku
ESI Working Papers
We provide real-time evidence on the impact of Covid-19 restrictions policies on conflicts globally. We use daily information on conflict events and government policy responses to limit the spread of coronavirus to study how conflict levels vary following shutdown and lockdown policies. We use the staggered implementation of restriction policies across countries to identify their effect on conflict incidence and intensity. Our results show that imposing a nation-wide shutdown reduces the likelihood of daily conflict by around 9 percentage points. The reduction is driven by a drop in the incidence of battles, protests and violence against civilians. Across actors the …
Institutions, Opportunism And Prosocial Behavior: Some Experimental Evidence, Antonio Cabrales, Irma Clots-Figueras, Roberto Hernán-González, Praveen Kujal
Institutions, Opportunism And Prosocial Behavior: Some Experimental Evidence, Antonio Cabrales, Irma Clots-Figueras, Roberto Hernán-González, Praveen Kujal
ESI Working Papers
Formal or informal institutions have long been adopted by societies to protect against opportunistic behavior. However, we know very little about how these institutions are chosen and their impact on behavior. We experimentally investigate the demand for different levels of institutions that provide low to high levels of insurance and its subsequent impact on prosocial behavior. We conduct a large-scale online experiment where we add the possibility of purchasing insurance to safeguard against low reciprocity to the standard trust game. We compare two different mechanisms, the private (purchase) and the social (voting) choice of institutions. Whether voted or purchased, we …
Information Aggregation And The Cognitive Make-Up Of Traders, Brice Corgnet, Mark Desantis, David Porter
Information Aggregation And The Cognitive Make-Up Of Traders, Brice Corgnet, Mark Desantis, David Porter
ESI Working Papers
We assess the effect of the cognitive make-up of traders on the informational efficiency of markets. We put forth that cognitive skills, such as cognitive reflection, are crucial for ensuring the informational efficiency of markets because they endow traders with the ability to infer others’ information from prices. Using laboratory experiments, we show that information aggregation is significantly enhanced when (i) all traders possess high levels of cognitive sophistication and (ii) this high level of cognitive sophistication is common information for all traders. Our findings shed light on the cognitive and informational constraints underlying the efficient market hypothesis.
Neoclassical Supply And Demand, Experiments, And The Classical Theory Of Price Formation, Sabiou M. Inoua, Vernon L. Smith
Neoclassical Supply And Demand, Experiments, And The Classical Theory Of Price Formation, Sabiou M. Inoua, Vernon L. Smith
ESI Working Papers
"The 1870s neoclassical marginal revolution in economics culminated a century later in a striking conclusion: The core utility maximization principle of neoclassical economics was shown to have no interesting implication for aggregate market behavior (Sonnenschein, 1972, 1973a, 1973b; Debreu, 1974; Mantel, 1974; Kirman, 1989; Shafer & Sonnenschein, 1993; Rizvi, 2006). We argue that neoclassical price theory was founded on two axioms—price-taking behavior and the law of one price in a market—that, if imposed on the theory, were logically inconsistent with a theory of market price formation. This logical gap in neoclassical theory was filled essentially with thought experiments: Jevons derives …
Viral Social Media Videos Can Raise Pro-Social Behaviours When An Epidemic Arises, Youting Guo, Jason Shachat, Matthew J. Walker, Lijia Wei
Viral Social Media Videos Can Raise Pro-Social Behaviours When An Epidemic Arises, Youting Guo, Jason Shachat, Matthew J. Walker, Lijia Wei
ESI Working Papers
At the onset of an epidemic, can viral social media videos induce the high levels of trust and pro-sociality required for a successful community response? Shortly after the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus in Wuhan, China, we conducted an experiment assessing the impact of viral videos on individual preferences and pro-social behaviour. Prior to the experiment, participants viewed one of three videos culled from Chinese social media: a central government leader visiting a local hospital and supermarket, health care volunteers transiting to Wuhan, or an emotionally neutral video unrelated to the emergency. Viewing one of the first two videos leads …
A Test Of The Modigliani-Miller Theorem, Dividend Policy And Algorithmic Arbitrage In Experimental Asset Markets, Tibor Neugebauer, Jason Shachat, Wiebke Szymczak
A Test Of The Modigliani-Miller Theorem, Dividend Policy And Algorithmic Arbitrage In Experimental Asset Markets, Tibor Neugebauer, Jason Shachat, Wiebke Szymczak
ESI Working Papers
Modigliani and Miller showed that the market value of the company is in dependent of its capital structure, and suggested that dividend policy makes no difference to this law of one price. We experimentally test the MM theorem in a complete market with two simultaneously traded assets, employing two experimental treatment variations. The first variation involves the dividend stream. According to this variation the dividend payout order is either identical or independent. The second variation involves the market participation, or not, of an algorithmic arbitrageur. We find that Modigliani-Miller's law of one price can be supported on average with or …
The Classical Theory Of Supply And Demand, Sabiou M. Inoua, Vernon L. Smith
The Classical Theory Of Supply And Demand, Sabiou M. Inoua, Vernon L. Smith
ESI Working Papers
This paper introduces and formalizes the classical view on supply and demand, which, we argue, has an integrity independent and distinct from the neoclassical theory. Demand and supply, before the marginal rev-olution, are defined not by an unobservable criterion such as a utility func-tion, but by an observable monetary variable, the reservation price: the buyer’s (maximum) willingness to pay (WTP) value (a potential price) and the seller’s (minimum) willingness to accept (WTA) value (a potential price) at the marketplace. Market demand and supply are the cumulative distri-bution of the buyers’ and sellers’ reservation prices, respectively. This WTP-WTA classical view of …
Let’S Chat... When Communication Promotes Efficiency In Experimental Asset Markets, Brice Corgnet, Mark Desantis, David Porter
Let’S Chat... When Communication Promotes Efficiency In Experimental Asset Markets, Brice Corgnet, Mark Desantis, David Porter
ESI Working Papers
The growing prevalence of stock market chat rooms and social media suggests communication between traders may affect market outcomes. Using data from a series of laboratory experiments, we study the causal effect of trader communication on the price efficiency of markets. We show that communication allows markets to convey private information more effectively. This effect is most pronounced when the communication platform publicizes a reputation score that might identify a person as not being truthful. This illustrates the need for market designers to consider social interactions when designing market institutions to leverage the social motives that foster information aggregation.
An Empirical Study Of The Sentiment Capital Asset Pricing Model, Soroush Ghazi, Mark Schneider
An Empirical Study Of The Sentiment Capital Asset Pricing Model, Soroush Ghazi, Mark Schneider
ESI Working Papers
What is market sentiment? This paper takes a new approach to this question and de- rives a formula for market sentiment as a function of the risk-free rate, the price/dividend ratio, and the conditional stock market volatility. The formula is derived from a representative agent with a prospect theory probability weighting function. We estimate the model and find that our sentiment measure correlates positively with the leading sentiment indexes. The model matches the equity premium while generating a low and stable risk-free rate with low risk aversion. We also apply the model to explain other anomalies for the aggregate stock …
Categorical Salience Theory, Mark Schneider, Cary Deck, Patrick Dejarnette
Categorical Salience Theory, Mark Schneider, Cary Deck, Patrick Dejarnette
ESI Working Papers
Monetary lotteries are the overwhelmingly predominant tool for understanding decisions under risk. However, many real-world decisions concern multidimensional out- comes involving different goods. Recent studies have tested whether people treat multidimensional risky choices in the same manner as unidimensional monetary lotteries and found that choices over consumer goods are less risk-averse and more consistent with expected utility theory than choices over monetary lotteries. While these puzzling results cannot be explained by any standard model of decision making, we demonstrate that these findings are predicted by a salience-based model of category-dependent preferences that also explains the classic anomalies for choices under …
Working Too Much For Too Little: Stochastic Rewards Cause Work Addiction, Brice Corgnet, Simon Gaechter, Roberto Hernán González
Working Too Much For Too Little: Stochastic Rewards Cause Work Addiction, Brice Corgnet, Simon Gaechter, Roberto Hernán González
ESI Working Papers
People are generally assumed to shy away from activities generating stochastic rewards, thus re-quiring extra compensation for handling any additional risk. In contrast with this view, neurosci-ence research with animals has shown that stochastic rewards may act as a powerful motivator. Applying these ideas to the study of work addiction in humans, and using a new experimental paradigm, we demonstrate how stochastic rewards may lead people to continue working on a re-petitive and effortful task even after monetary compensation becomes saliently negligible. In line with our hypotheses, we show that persistence on the work task is especially pronounced when the …
Harnessing The Power Of Social Incentives To Curb Shirking In Teams, Brice Corgnet, Brian C. Gunia, Roberto Hernán González
Harnessing The Power Of Social Incentives To Curb Shirking In Teams, Brice Corgnet, Brian C. Gunia, Roberto Hernán González
ESI Working Papers
We study several solutions to shirking in teams that trigger social incentives by reshaping the workplace social context. Using an experimental design, we manipulate social pressure at work by varying the type of workplace monitoring and the extent to which employees engage in social interaction. This design allows us to assess the effectiveness as well as the popularity of each solution. Despite similar effectiveness in boosting productivity across solutions, only organizational systems involving social interaction (via chat) were at least as popular as a baseline treatment. This suggests that any solution based on promoting social interaction is more likely to …
Adam Smith’S Theory Of Value: A Reappraisal Of Classical Price Discovery, Sabiou M. Inoua, Vernon L. Smith
Adam Smith’S Theory Of Value: A Reappraisal Of Classical Price Discovery, Sabiou M. Inoua, Vernon L. Smith
ESI Working Papers
The relevance of Adam Smith for understanding human morality and sociality is recognized in the growing interest in his work on moral sentiments among scholars of various academic backgrounds. But, paradoxically, Adam Smith’s theory of economic value enjoys a less prominent stature today among economists, who, while they view him as the “father of modern economics”, considered him more as having had the right intuitions about a market economy than as having developed the right concepts and the technical tools for studying it. Yet the neoclassical tradition, which replaced the classical school around 1870, failed to provide a satisfactory theory …
All Pay Quality-Bids In Score Procurement Auctions, Dan Kovenock, Jingfeng Lu
All Pay Quality-Bids In Score Procurement Auctions, Dan Kovenock, Jingfeng Lu
ESI Working Papers
In this paper, we study score procurement auctions with all-pay quality bids. A supplier’s score is the difference between his quality and price bids. The supplier with the highest score wins and gets paid his own price bid. The procurer’s payoff is the difference between the winner’s quality and the procurer’s payments to the suppliers. Equilibrium quality and price bids are solved without first obtaining the corresponding equilibrium scores. We find that quality bids, the suppliers’ payoffs and the procurer’s payoff do not depend on whether price bids are made contingent on quality bids. Compared to a benchmark of winner-pay …
Rationally Inattentive Savers And Monetary Policy Changes: A Laboratory Experiment, Andrea Civelli, Cary Deck, Antonella Tutino
Rationally Inattentive Savers And Monetary Policy Changes: A Laboratory Experiment, Andrea Civelli, Cary Deck, Antonella Tutino
ESI Working Papers
We study the response of consumption and saving decisions of rationally inattentive individuals to changes in monetary policy in the laboratory. First, we theoretically characterize the choices of a rationally inattentive agent processing information about the interest rate. Then, we design an experiment with induced inattention to test for the predictions of the model, contrasting them to the full information case. Consistent with the predictions, experimental subjects (a) increase attention when utility gains exceed cognitive costs of tracking the policy rate and decrease savings when their perceived economic outlook deteriorates; (b) respond to Delphic, but not Odyssean, forms of forward …
Reconsidering Rational Expectations And The Aggregation Of Diverse Information In Laboratory Security Markets, Brice Corgnet, Cary Deck, Mark Desantis, Kyle Hampton, Erik O. Kimbrough
Reconsidering Rational Expectations And The Aggregation Of Diverse Information In Laboratory Security Markets, Brice Corgnet, Cary Deck, Mark Desantis, Kyle Hampton, Erik O. Kimbrough
ESI Working Papers
The ability of markets to aggregate dispersed information is a cornerstone of economics and finance. In a seminal experiment, Plott and Sunder (1988) offer support for the rational expectations hypothesis. However, recent laboratory experiments have called into question the robustness of those initial results. In this paper, we offer the first attempt to directly replicate key findings of the original study. Failing to replicate their results, the post-study probability that market performance is better described by rational expectations than the prior information (Walrasian) model is low. Given this result, we introduce a new treatment that implements a market structure consistent …
An Experimental Comparison Of News Vending And Price Gouging, Zuzana Brokesova, Cary Deck, Jana Peliova
An Experimental Comparison Of News Vending And Price Gouging, Zuzana Brokesova, Cary Deck, Jana Peliova
ESI Working Papers
The newsvendor problem is a workhorse model in operation management research. We introduce a related game that operates in the price dimension rather than the inventory dimension: the price gouging game. Using controlled laboratory experiments, we compare news vending and price gouging behavior. We replicate the standard pull-to-center effect for news vending and find that the equivalent pattern occurs with price gouging. Further, we find that the pull-to-center is asymmetric both for newsvendors and price gougers. More broadly, the experimental results reveal that choices are similar across the theoretically isomorphic games, suggesting that observed behavior in newsvendor experiments is representative …
Reference Dependent Prices In Bargaining: An Experimental Examination Of Precise First Offers, Erik O. Kimbrough, David Porter, Mark Schneider
Reference Dependent Prices In Bargaining: An Experimental Examination Of Precise First Offers, Erik O. Kimbrough, David Porter, Mark Schneider
ESI Working Papers
Evidence from psychology and marketing suggests that those who make a "precise" first offer in bargaining get a better deal than those who make a "round" first offer. We report on a series of experiments designed to test for and improve our understanding of the "precise first offer" (PFO) effect in bargaining and whether it likely reflects rational optimizing or equilibrium behavior. Our experimental treatments vary whether decisions are incentivized and whether the PFO effect can emerge as an equilibrium of a cheap-talk signaling game. We find evidence of a PFO effect when subjects read a vignette and make unincentivized …
The Doors Of Perception, Gary Charness, Alessandro Sontuoso
The Doors Of Perception, Gary Charness, Alessandro Sontuoso
ESI Working Papers
We investigate how a player’s strategic behavior is affected by the set of notions she uses in thinking about the game, i.e., the “frame”. To do so, we consider matching games where two players are presented with a set of objects, from which each player must privately choose one (with the goal of matching the counterpart’s choice). We propose a novel theory positing that different player types are aware of different attributes of the strategy options, hence different frames; we then rationalize why differences in players’ frames may lead to differences in choice behavior. Unlike previous theories of framing, our …
Harnessing The Power Of Social Incentives To Curb Shirking In Teams, Brice Corgnet, Brian C. Gunia, Roberto Hernán González
Harnessing The Power Of Social Incentives To Curb Shirking In Teams, Brice Corgnet, Brian C. Gunia, Roberto Hernán González
ESI Working Papers
We study several solutions to shirking in teams that trigger social incentives by reshaping the workplace social context. Using an experimental design, we manipulate social pressure at work by varying the type of workplace monitoring and the extent to which employees engage in social interaction. This design allows us to assess the effectiveness as well as the popularity of each solution. Despite similar effectiveness in boosting productivity across solutions, only organizational systems involving social interaction (via chat) were at least as popular as a baseline treatment. This suggests that any solution based on promoting social interaction is more likely to …
News-Driven Expectations And Volatility Clustering, Sabiou M. Inoua
News-Driven Expectations And Volatility Clustering, Sabiou M. Inoua
ESI Working Papers
Financial volatility obeys two well-established empirical properties: it is fat-tailed (power-law distributed) and it tends to be clustered in time. Many interesting models have been proposed to account for these regularities, notably agent-based computational models, which typically invoke complicated mechanisms, however. It can be shown that trend-following speculation generates the power law in an intrinsic way. But this model cannot exaplain clustered volatility. This paper extends the model and offers a simple explanation for clustered volatility: the impact of exogenous news on traders’ expectations. Owing to the famous no-trade results, rational expectations, the dominant model of news-driven expectations, is hard …