Experimental Economics最新文献

Pro-social individuals typically face a trade-off between their monetary incentives and their other-regarding preferences. When this is the case, they may be tempted to exploit the uncertainty in their decision environment to reconcile this trade-off. In this paper, we investigate whether individuals with belief-dependent preferences acquire information about others’ expectations in a self-serving way. We present a model of endogenous information acquisition and test our theoretical predictions in an online experiment based on a modified trust-game in which the trustee is uncertain about the trustor’s expectations. Our experimental design enables us to (1) identify participants with belief-based preferences and (2) investigate their information acquisition strategy. Consistent with our predictions for subjective belief-dependent preferences, we find that most individuals classified as belief-dependent strategically select their source of information to avoid the cost of their conscience.

The consequences of most economic decisions are uncertain; they are conditional on events with unknown probabilities that decision makers evaluate based on their beliefs. In addition to consequences and beliefs, the context that generates events—the source of uncertainty—can also impact preferences, a pattern called source dependence. Despite its importance, there is currently no definition of source dependence that allows for comparisons across individuals and sources. This paper presents a tractable definition of source dependence by introducing a function that matches the subjective probabilities of events generated by two sources. It also presents methods for estimating such functions from a limited number of observations that are compatible with commonly-used choice-based approaches for separating attitudes from beliefs. As an illustration, we implement these methods on three datasets, including two original experiments, and show that they consistently capture clear, albeit heterogeneous, patterns of source dependence between natural sources. Our approach provides a framework for future research to explore how source dependence varies across individuals and situations.

Teamwork has become increasingly important in modern organizations and the labor market. Yet, little is known about the role of self-confidence in teamwork. In this paper, we present evidence from a laboratory experiment using a team effort task. Effort and ability are complements and there are synergies between teammates’ efforts. We exogenously manipulate subjects’ self-confidence about their ability using easy and hard general knowledge quizzes. We find that overconfidence leads to more effort, less free riding, and higher team revenue. This finding is primarily due to a direct effect of overconfidence on own effort provision, while there is no evidence that subjects strategically respond to the teammate’s overconfidence.

We conduct an experiment where participants make choices between completing a task now or waiting to complete it in the future. We vary the dates when a task can be completed and the effort required at each date. We infer participants’ preferences for when to complete a task and their expectations about how their future preferences will differ from their current ones. Our findings indicate that most participants prefer to complete tasks immediately, even if it demands more effort than waiting. Their choices generally align with the principles of time consistency, monotonicity, and time invariance. We show that quasi-hyperbolic discounting, anticipatory utility, fixed costs, decision costs, and cost-of-keeping-track are all unable to provide a reasonable account of both our findings and related experiments.

Norm-based accounts of social behavior in economics typically reflect tradeoffs between maximization of own consumption utility and conformity to social norms. Theories of norm-following tend to assume that there exists a single, stable, commonly known injunctive social norm for a given choice setting and that each person has a stable propensity to follow social norms. We collect panel data on 1468 participants aged 11–15 years in Belfast, Northern Ireland and Bogotá, Colombia in which we measure norms for the dictator game and norm-following propensity twice at 10 weeks apart. We test these basic assumptions and find that norm-following propensity is stable, on average, but reported norms show evidence of change. We find that individual-level variation in reported norms between people and within people across time has interpretable structure using a series of latent transition analyses (LTA) which extend latent class models to a panel setting. The best fitting model includes five latent classes corresponding to five sets of normative beliefs that can be interpreted in terms of what respondents view as “appropriate” (e.g. equality vs. generosity) and how they view deviations (e.g. deontological vs. consequentialist). We also show that a major predictor of changing latent classes over time comes from dissimilarity to others in one’s network. Our application of LTA demonstrates how researchers can engage with heterogeneity in normative perceptions by identifying latent classes of beliefs and deepening understanding of the extent to which norms are shared, stable, and can be predicted to change. Finally, we contribute to the nascent experimental literature on the economic behavior of children and adolescents.

We offer a novel test of whether non-binding goals set ahead of a task are effective motivators, taking into account that individuals in principle could easily revise these goals. In our setting, subjects either set a goal some days prior to an online task (early goal) or right at the start of the task (late goal). Two further treatments allow for (unanticipated) explicit revision of the early goal. We observe that (i) early goals are larger than late goals; (ii) subjects who set early goals work more than those who only set a late goal if they explicitly revise their goal and are reminded about their revised goal. A secondary contribution of our paper is that our design addresses a treatment migration problem present in earlier studies on goals that stems from the fact that subjects in a ‘no goals’ control condition may privately set goals.

Abstract

The highly popular belief that rent-control leads to an increase in the amount of affordable housing is in contradiction with ample empirical evidence and congruent theoretical explanations. It can therefore be qualified as a misconception. We present the results of a preregistered on-line experiment in which we study how to dispel this misconception using a refutational approach in two different formats, a video and a text. We find that the refutational video has a significantly higher positive impact on revising the misconception than a refutational text. This effect is driven by individuals who initially agreed with it and depart from it after the treatment. The refutational text, in turn, does not have a significant impact relative to a non-refutational text. Higher cognitive reflective ability is positively associated with revising beliefs in all interventions. Our research shows that visual communication effectively reduces the gap between scientific economic knowledge and the views of citizens.

We investigate the role of visual attention in risky choice in a rich experimental dataset that includes eye-tracking data. We first show that attention is not reducible to individual and contextual variables, which explain only 20% of attentional variation. We then decompose attentional variation into individual average attention and trial-wise deviations of attention to capture different cognitive processes. Individual average attention varies by individual, and can proxy for individual preferences or goals (as in models of "rational inattention" or goal-directed attention). Trial-wise deviations of attention vary within subjects and depend on contextual factors (as in models of "salience" or stimulus-driven attention). We find that both types of attention predict behavior: average individual attention patterns are correlated with individual levels of loss aversion and capture part of this individual heterogeneity. Adding trial-wise deviations of attention further improves model fit. Our results show that a decomposition of attention into individual average attention and trial-wise deviations of attention can capture separable cognitive components of decision making and provides a useful tool for economists and researchers from related fields interested in decision-making and attention.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10683-024-09849-7.

We experimentally test a model of public good bargaining due to Bowen et al. (Am Econ Rev 104:2941–2974, 2014) and compare two institutions governing bargaining over public good allocations. The setup involves two parties negotiating the distribution of a fixed endowment between a public good and each party’s individual account. Parties attach either high or low weight to the public good and the difference in these weights reflects the degree of polarization. Under discretionary bargaining rules, the status quo default allocation to the group account (in the event of disagreement) is zero while under the mandatory bargaining rule it is equal to the level last agreed upon. The mandatory rule thus creates a dynamic relationship between current decisions and future payoffs, and our experiment tests the theoretical prediction that the efficient level of public good is provided under the mandatory rule while the level of public good funding is at a sub-optimal level under the discretionary rule. Consistent with the theory, we find that proposers (particularly those attaching high weight to the public good) propose significantly greater allocations to the public good under mandatory rules than under discretionary rules and this result is strengthened with an increase in polarization. Still, public good allocations under mandatory rules fall short of steady state predictions, primarily due to fairness concerns that prevent proposers from exercising full proposer power.