Journal of Economic Psychology最新文献

Much policy attention has been placed on encouraging saving behaviours to avoid financial deprivation at older adulthood. However, optimising financial investments is highly dependent on cognitive capacity, which can be deteriorated by the natural ageing process. This paper explores the relationship between age-related cognitive deterioration with risky and non-risky financial investments. The data analysed comes from eight waves (2002 to 2019) of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) which, for a nationally representative sample, contains information about cognitive ability and their ownership of financial investments over time. Cognition emerges as one of the strongest predictors of the type and number of financial products that individuals hold. Specifically, the results show a positive relation of cognitive level with risky and non-risky financial investments. Even alongside other important factors – such as education, labour status, age, and household wealth – the explanatory power of cognition is found to be significant at the 0.1% significance level. The results are robust when accounting for unobservables and when using a genetic measure of cognition as main explanatory variable. More importantly, cognitive deterioration is only significantly associated with risky financial investments. That means, individuals reduce their risky financial investments when they start suffering old age related cognitive deterioration, while they do not change their holdings in non-risky ones in a significant manner. There are also no significant differences in the reactions to stock-market fluctuations due to cognitive level. In other words, individuals react to stock market fluctuations changing their financial holdings, but those reactions do not differ due to their cognitive level.

In a MouselabWEB experiment with 345 participants, we investigated whether different presentations of expected value information in tax compliance decisions increase conformity with classical deterrence models’ assumptions. Recording both choice and process data, we compare conditions of verbal explanation only, verbal explanation plus numerical cue, verbal explanation plus visual cue, and a control condition without expected value information. Only when the expected value was presented as a visual cue the option with the higher expected value (i.e., evasion) was chosen more often than the control condition (58.3% vs. 38.4%). Nevertheless, individuals were more compliant than predicted by the deterrence model. While we identified differences between the experimental conditions in information acquisition patterns and decision times, they do not suggest that one way of presenting expected value information was easier to process than the others or that the main behavioral effect can be explained by higher saliency of the visual cue. These results indicate that individuals' decisions are not predominantly driven by outcome maximization, even when explicit expected value information is provided.

Homophily, the tendency of interacting with similar others, has been found to be an important determinant of the existence and stability of social groups, whereas social relationships within these groups vary in the degree of social proximity. In this paper, I investigate how perceived similarity affects social proximity and care towards a partner and altruistic giving. In a between-subjects design, subjects are matched with either a similar or a dissimilar partner and play a dictator game. Similarity is induced via objective similarities on pre-elicited personality profiles based on Big-Five personality traits. I show that perceiving someone as more similar increases giving in a dictator game. A mediation analysis shows that social proximity and care towards the partner mediate the treatment effect. That is, subjects in the similar treatment feel a higher degree of social proximity to their partner, leading to a higher degree of care towards the latter and therefore, give more in the dictator game.

The economics literature offers at least two main explanations of why individuals adopt the heuristic of following their leader’s suggestion: First, the leader has information or a talent relevant to the task at hand and, second, the leader’s suggestion helps to reduce uncertainty and to coordinate the group on one choice. The psychology literature offers another explanation: The leader, acting as an “ethical example,” helps to increase job satisfaction, performance, and prosocial behavior. Both lines of literature, although in different ways, assume rational choice on the part of followers. Neither literature addresses the question: Would people adopt the leadership heuristic if the leader lacks any relevant information, talent advantage, ethical character, or other desirable traits? We report experimental evidence that suggests the answer is yes. In our experiment, leaders suggest the outcome of a fair “coin toss.” Leaders vary in (irrelevant) “information” and (irrelevant) “ability” possessed. Although there is no feedback after each period, we find that one-third of all the decisions of the participants heuristically follow the leader’s choice. This is surprising given that, first, the leader’s choice is irrelevant and, second, to follow it would be payoff-reducing. Payoff-reducing choices of subjects are more frequent with irrelevantly informed leaders than with irrelevantly talented leaders. Crucially, we also show that the findings are not driven by lack of understanding of random events. In short, neither the hot-hand and gambler’s fallacies nor attributes that might inspire trust/loyalty can explain subjects’ choices.

Smoking is one of the leading causes of preventable disease and death in the U.S., and it is strongly influenced both by genetic predisposition and childhood adversity. Using polygenic indices (PGIs) of predisposition to smoking, we evaluate whether childhood financial distress (CFD; a composite measure of financial adversity) moderates genetic risk in explaining peak-cigarette consumption in adulthood. Using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we find a substantial reduction in the relationship between genetic risk and peak smoking for those who did not suffer financial adversity in childhood. Among adult smokers who grew up in high-CFD households, a one standard deviation higher PGI is associated with 2.9 more cigarettes smoked per day at peak. By contrast, among smokers who grew up in low-CFD households, this gradient is reduced by 37 percent (or 1.1 fewer). These results are robust to controlling for a host of prime confounders. By contrast, we find no evidence of interactions between the PGI and typical measures of childhood SES such as parental education - a null result that we replicate in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) and the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA). This suggests the role of childhood financial distress in the relationship with peak smoking is distinct from that of low childhood SES, with high CFD potentially reflecting more acute distress than do measures of low childhood SES. Our evidence also suggests low childhood SES is a weaker proxy for acute distress, providing an alternative explanation for the childhood SES null result.

Smiling is a popular and powerful facial signal used to influence how we are judged and evaluated by others. The recent COVID pandemic made the use of face masks common around the world. Since face masks, when properly worn, cover the lower half of the face, a common concern is that they inhibit our ability to signal to others through facial expressions like smiles. In this paper, we show through three subsequent studies that smiling faces are easily distinguished from neutral faces even if the person is wearing a face mask (Study 1, N = 1814). We further show that smiling behind a face mask significantly influences ratings regarding attractiveness, trustworthiness, and competence (Study 2, N = 250). We finally show that individuals with about 18 months of experience with face masks are well aware that smiling behind face masks will influence ratings regarding attractiveness and trustworthiness by others (Study 3, N = 94). Together, our studies provide evidence that face masks should not be seen as a threat that inhibits simple non-verbal communication through smiles.

In 2019 when inflation was low and stable, we compared people’s direct estimates of inflation with indirect estimates obtained by averaging their estimates of price changes in all 12 product categories on which the consumer price index is based. Indirect estimates were much higher than direct ones and the two types of estimate were uncorrelated. This is consistent with a price-free model in which direct estimates are not based on recall of prices but are determined by other information such as media reports. In May 2022 when inflation was high, expected to rise in the short-term, but highly unpredictable in the longer term, we found that direct and indirect estimates were very similar and highly correlated. This is consistent with a price-recall model in which a representative set of prices is used to estimate overall inflation. Finally, in September 2022 when inflation was fairly stable except for certain product categories (food) where prices were rising rapidly, we found that results were consistent with a third approach, the price-salience model; overall estimates of inflation are selectively influenced by price rises in those product categories where they are particularly high. People’s strategy for estimating inflation appears adapted to the prevailing inflation environment.

Employing an incentivized controlled lab experiment, we investigate the effects of ovulatory shift on salient behavioral outcomes related to (i) risk preferences, (ii) rule violation, and (iii) exploratory attitude. As evolutionary psychology suggests, these outcomes may play an important role in economic decision-making and represent behavioral aspects that may systematically vary over the menstrual cycle to increase the reproductive success. Exploiting a within-subjects design, 124 naturally cycling females participated in experimental sessions during their ovulation and menstruation, the phases between which the difference in the investigated behavior should be the largest. In each session, hormonal samples for cortisol, estradiol, and testosterone were collected. The group of women was also contrasted against an auxiliary reference group composed of 47 males, who are not subject to hormonal variations of this nature. Our results reveal no systematic behavioral differences between the ovulation and menstruation phases.

In the present paper, we investigate how people make decisions when bargaining about complementary resources. When the ownership of such resources is fragmented, actors often fail to coordinate on efficient access, leading to an overall loss in social welfare; the tragedy of the anticommons. In a series of three experiments, in which we introduce a newly developed Anticommons Bargaining Game, we show that people tend to treat perfectly complementary resources as if they are non-complementary. Specifically, we demonstrate that both sellers and buyers of such resources used a more-is-better heuristic when determining their prices. That is, sellers who initially owned a larger part of the resource asked a higher price for their resource than sellers with a smaller part, even though only the combination of parts generated value for the buyer. Likewise, buyers offered more money to sellers with a larger part than to sellers with a smaller part. While this heuristic does not necessarily impede coordination, inequality in resources led to unequal monetary outcomes between the two sellers.

Every year millions of students study at foreign universities, swapping one set of cultural surroundings for another. This may reveal whether measured preferences are fixed or flexible, whether they can be altered in the short run by moving country, or learning a new language. We disentangle these influences by measuring international students’ preferences. For Chinese students in the UK (who arrived up to five years previously) we randomise a survey’s language. We add reference groups in each country, doing the survey in the relevant language. Simple comparisons provide a causal estimate of language’s effect and observational estimates of differences by country, location and nationality. We find language has a large causal effect on a range of survey responses. The effect size is similar to differences by country or nationality (at 0.4 standard deviations), and larger than differences by location (at 0.1 standard deviations). Assimilation theories predict any movement in measured preferences for Chinese students in the UK would be towards those of UK students, even if they may be small. We do not find this. In Mandarin, Chinese students hardly differ from those in Beijing. Yet in English, they are not close to either Chinese students in Beijing or British students in the UK. This can be explained by a model of identity priming with monocultural subjects. For Chinese students in the UK, speaking English reduces the pull of a Chinese frame without increasing the pull of a British one. International students do not so much learn foreign preferences as learn to ignore old ones. Our reliance on mostly stated preferences enables a rich dataset covering many domains; future work is needed to see if such large effects are also found for a wide range of revealed preferences.