Experimental Economics最新文献

To investigate whether attention responds rationally to strategic incentives, we experimentally implement a buyer-seller game in which a fully informed seller makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer to a buyer who faces cognitive costs to process information about the offer’s value. We isolate the impact of seller strategies on buyer attention by exogenously varying the seller’s outside option, which leads sellers to price high more often. We find that buyers respond by making fewer mistakes conditional on value, which suggests that buyers exert higher attentional effort in response to the increased strategic incentives for paying attention. We show that a standard model of rational inattention based on Shannon mutual information cannot fully explain this change in buyer behavior. However, we identify another class of rational inattention models consistent with this behavioral pattern.

We introduce price freeze options into a model of sequential search. The model’s predictions are tested in a laboratory experiment. The experiment varies (1) whether freezing is possible or not, (2) the cost of freezing, and (3) the time horizon. Overall, the observed treatment effects are consistent with the predictions of our model. Assuming that individuals experience regret, fail to ignore sunk search costs, misperceive the number of periods remaining, or are risk-averse, does not improve upon the performance of the model. Our results support the use of the assumption of optimal search behavior in theoretical and empirical studies.

We examine whether the way individuals randomize between options captures their decision confidence. In two experiments in which subjects faced pairs of options (a lottery and a varying sure payment), we allowed subjects to choose randomization probabilities according to which they would receive each option. Separately, we obtained two measures of self-reported confidence - confidence statements and probabilistic confidence - for choosing between the two options. Consistent with the predictions of two theoretical frameworks incorporating preference uncertainty, the randomization probabilities correlated strongly with both self-reported measures (median Spearman correlations between 0.86 to 0.89) and corresponded in absolute levels to probabilistic confidence. This relationship is robust to two exogenous manipulations of decision confidence, where we varied the complexity of the lottery and subjects’ experience with the lottery.

Individuals were found to anonymously predict positive election outcomes for their preferred candidate. Yet, there is little scientific knowledge about election predictions made in the context of same-camp political communications (i.e., partisan communications) that are presumably meant to encourage other supporters. In five studies of low-information elections and a study of hypothetical U.S. elections (n = 1889), we found that people tended to communicate favorable forecasts to others sharing their view, compared to the neutral point and to the actual election outcomes. On the other hand, negative framing reduced the positivity of forecasts in these communications to the extent that it led most participants to predict an election loss. This occurred in response to a single addressee acting discordantly and even more strongly when the election results were phrased as a drop. When both positive and negative framing options were available, this still negativity affected participants’ predictions even though only a minority selected the negative framing option. Thus, people tend to make optimistic election predictions in partisan communications, but this pattern is easily manipulable given subtle changes in the forecasting prompt, either by negative framing or selectable positive and negative framing.

How do people attribute responsibility when an outcome is not caused by an individual but results from a decision chain involving several people? We study this question in an experiment, in which five voters sequentially decide on how to distribute money between them and five recipients. The recipients can reward or punish each voter, which we use as measures of responsibility attribution. In the aggregate, we find that responsibility is attributed mostly according to the voters’ choices and the pivotality of the decision, but not for being the initial voter. On the individual level, we find substantial heterogeneity with three overall patterns: Little to no responsibility attribution, pivotality-driven, and focus on choices. These patterns are similar when praising voters for good outcomes and blaming voters for bad outcomes.

In a dyadic game, strategic asymmetric dominance occurs when a player’s preference for one strategy A relative to another B is systematically increased by the addition of a third strategy Z, strictly dominated by A but not by B. There are theoretical and empirical grounds for believing that this effect should decline over repetitions, and other grounds for believing, on the contrary, that it should persist. To investigate this question experimentally, 30 participant pairs played 50 rounds of one symmetric and two asymmetric 3 × 3 games each having one strategy strictly dominated by one other, and a control group played 2 × 2 versions of the same games with dominated strategies removed. The strategic asymmetric dominance effect was observed in the repeated-choice data: dominant strategies in the 3 × 3 versions were chosen more frequently than the corresponding strategies in the 2 × 2 versions. Time series analysis revealed a significant decline in the effect over repetitions in the symmetric game only. Supplementary verbal protocol analysis helped to clarify the players’ reasoning and to explain the results.

We report laboratory evidence on the voluntary provision of threshold public goods when the exact location of the threshold is not known. Our experimental treatments explicitly compare two prominent technologies, summation, and weakest link. Uncertainty in threshold location is particularly detrimental to threshold attainment under weakest link, where low contributions by one subject cannot be compensated by others. In contrast, threshold uncertainty does not affect contributions under summation. We demonstrate that non-binding pledges improve the chances of threshold attainment under both technologies, particularly under weakest link.

This study investigates the mechanisms driving the effectiveness of free-form communication in promoting cooperation within a sequential social dilemma game. We hypothesize that the self-constructing nature of free-form communication enhances the sincerity of messages and increases the disutility of dishonoring promises. Our experimental results demonstrate that free-form messages outperform both restricted promises and treatments where subjects select and use previously constructed free-form messages. Interestingly, we find that selected free-form messages and restricted promises achieve similar levels of cooperation. We observe that free-form messages with higher sincerity increase the likelihood of high-price and high-quality choices, thereby promoting cooperation. These messages frequently include promises and honesty, while threats do not promote cooperation. Our findings emphasize the crucial role of the self-constructed nature of free-form messages in promoting cooperation, exceeding the impact of message content compared to restricted communication protocols.

Gallice and Monzón (Econ J 129(621):2137–2154, 2019) present present a natural environment that sustains full co-operation in one-shot social dilemmas among a finite number of self-interested agents. They demonstrate that in a sequential public goods game, where agents lack knowledge of their position in the sequence but can observe some predecessors’ actions, full contribution emerges in equilibrium due to agents’ incentive to induce potential successors to follow suit. In this study, we aim to test the theoretical predictions of this model through an economic experiment. We conducted three treatments, varying the amount of information about past actions that a subject can observe, as well as their positional awareness. Through rigorous structural econometric analysis, we found that approximately 25% of the subjects behaved in line with the theoretical predictions. However, we also observed the presence of alternative behavioural types among the remaining subjects. The majority were classified as conditional co-operators, showing a willingness to cooperate based on others’ actions. Some subjects exhibited altruistic tendencies, while only a small minority engaged in free-riding behaviour.

We conduct a field experiment with Amazon Mechanical Turk (“AMT”) workers to causally assess the effect of introducing a control mechanism in an existing work relationship on workers’ performance on tasks of varying difficulty. We find that introducing control significantly reduces performance. This reduction occurs primarily on challenging tasks, while performance on simple tasks is unaffected. The negative effects are primarily driven by workers who exhibit non-pecuniary motivation in the absence of control. Our results show that there are adverse effects of control, and they suggest that these adverse effects are of particular concern to firms that rely on high performance on challenging tasks.