Journal of Economic Psychology最新文献

With Bitcoin at the forefront, cryptocurrencies are gaining traction as an alternative asset investment, particularly among young investors. Although most of the empirical evidence has shown that it could not be defined as a currency, some Bitcoin users argue the opposite. This paper analyzes the factors influencing the perception of Bitcoin, i.e., whether it is a currency or an asset, with a focus on financial literacy among a subject pool of university students in Italy. The results show that, after controlling for several individual characteristics such as behavioral biases, personal attitudes, psychological traits, and socio-demographic information, this cryptocurrency is considered more than just an asset, and thus it could replace currency, among subjects with lower financial literacy, higher knowledge of Bitcoin, and those who do not trust the banking system. In contrast, Bitcoin is considered a speculative asset among those individuals with higher financial literacy. In line with the recent evidence that cryptocurrencies are mostly owned by young investors, results indicate the importance of increasing the level of financial education among them.

Social norms are a key driving force in supporting pro-social behavior. However, existing studies focusing on the effects of norms often neglect the time signature of pro-social decisions, limiting its scope of explanation. The current study investigated the impact of injunctive norms (e.g., “This is the most socially normative donation”) on intertemporal pro-social giving across two experiments. Experiment 1 indicated that independent of social norms, generosity in economic sharing behavior decreased hyperbolically as time delay increased. Interestingly, the No norm group exhibited a steeper discounting function (i.e., less generous) than the High norm group. Experiment 2 extended these results and confirmed the mediating role of time perception. Overall, this research demonstrates that injunctive norms can influence individual intertemporal pro-social preferences and offers practical implications for increasing intertemporal pro-social giving using injunctive norms.

In this paper, I compare two ways of eliciting cheating behavior in online experiments. I present data from two online experiments, one in which participants’ random drawing took place directly on their screens (Observed-Cheating Game) and another in which participants chose a color in their minds and then randomly drew a color from ten boxes with question marks presented on their screens (Mind-Cheating Game). The paper shows that observed online games are more likely to have non-significant treatment differences because the effect of observability is particularly strong. I show that using mind games to generate random draws in online settings solves the most prominent problems for eliciting lying by making the lies unidentifiable at the individual level. The Mind-Cheating Game used in the experiment is inspired by previous mind games and is specifically adapted to be easily implemented in online or field experiments.

The present paper evaluates the importance of belief updating for the prevalence of the disposition effect – the reluctance to sell assets at losses as compared to gains. In particular, the present paper studies whether restricting choices in investment risk taking decisions motivates different learning from the decision outcomes and whether such differences in learning cause differences in the emergence of the disposition effect. The results show that investors learn from negative outcomes more like Bayesians if their risk-taking decisions are restricted. Causal mediation analysis reveals that such differences in learning increases the probability to sell after losses, which improves the overall investment performance. Compared to gains, the differences in learning after losses explain also why investors making active risk-taking choices are less likely to sell after losses as compared to gains, while the effect is reversed when choices are restricted. These findings suggest that restricting the discretion in decisions influences the way investors learn from decision outcomes and these differences in learning can explain puzzling differences in the risk-taking behavior of individual investors.

Are people less pro-social when sharing losses instead of gains? This paper reports the findings of a meta-analysis of 33 studies with 114 estimates from ultimatum and dictator games in which participants share losses (of money, time, or even physical well-being) instead of gains. We provide evidence that dictators leave significantly more to receivers when sharing losses. Proposers are also fairer when sharing losses, but the result is only significant when protocol biases are controlled for. Receivers, on the other hand, demand significantly more in the loss-sharing ultimatum game than in the gain-sharing game. They also demand significantly more when the strategy method is employed. Moreover, we found that non-students are more generous and fairer when sharing losses than students. Finally, we found that, whether sharing a loss of time, a loss of money, or physical pain, players’ behaviors do not differ in terms of the percentage of loss shared or demanded.

This paper studies temporal-distance effects on individual and social risks, testing Construal Level Theory. We elicit WTPs for risky and ambiguous lotteries and vary the timing (immediately vs. in two weeks) when the uncertainty is resolved. Subjects have lower WTPs for longshots than for safer lotteries. Under ambiguity, this gap decreases with temporal distance. Subjects are ambiguity averse, which becomes less pronounced when low-probability lotteries are processed in the future. In a trust game, we study temporal-distance effects on social risks. Time distance lowers trust as trustors correctly anticipate that reciprocity is lower when trustees decide in the future.

Trust is crucial for social, economic, and political relationships. Evidence shows the importance of trust in distinct areas, from the day-to-day forming of personal relations to the stability of democracies. In this paper, we ask how new technologies that compete for our attention affect the formation of trust between strangers. To that end, we study how smartphone use affects interactions with, and subsequent trust in, strangers. In our experiment, we had participants wait in groups of six for approximately 20 minutes, allowing them to interact as they wished. In one treatment, participants could use their smartphones during the wait time, while in the other they did not have access to their phones. We then randomly paired participants within each group to play a trust game and answer a brief survey. As predicted, we find that limiting phone access resulted in higher levels of trustworthiness.

We empirically test the relationship between crime and impatience at the individual level, exploiting data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97). Besides providing information on violent, property, and drug crimes, NLSY97 allows us to observe different behaviors, sharing impatience as a common latent factor. We use factor analysis to extract this common factor as a measure of impatience. Estimates from a Logit model suggest a positive association between impatience and crime. This relationship differs across violent, property, and drug crimes, but we do not find significant heterogeneities when comparing individuals according to gender, parental education, and ethnic groups. The main result is robust to different factor analysis specifications and controls for risk preferences. Our findings support policies aimed at influencing individual time preferences as an indirect way to combat crime.

Negative emotions have been shown to influence financial risk-taking. However, how receiving salient information about prior outcomes interacts with a decision-maker’s emotional state is not well known. In a laboratory experiment, we induced a fearful emotional state to investigate its effects on financial investment when outcome probabilities are unknown but decision-makers observe prior outcomes. The effects of fear on investment depended on whether the sequence of previous outcomes was favorable or unfavorable and contained weak or strong information. Our findings suggest that fear affected investment, at least in part, through changes in expectations of success.

Although most people are not outright selfish, cooperation frequently fails. Fischbacher and Gächter (2010) explain the well-established decline of contributions in repeated public good games with a genuine imperfection in conditional cooperation. Reanalyzing their data, we offer a more nuanced explanation. Conditional cooperators are nearly perfect, when others cooperate as well. Yet conditional cooperators strongly react to negative experiences, chiefly caused by selfish individuals. These bad experiences are the main driver for the imperfection in conditional cooperation and thus of the downward trend in contributions in repeated public good games.