Journal of Economic Psychology最新文献

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.

We explore the psychological mechanisms underlying self-serving redistribution decisions in an experimental setting. This self-serving bias in redistribution has been attributed not only to self-interest, but also to constructs such as differing beliefs about the hard work or luck underlying inequality, differing fairness views, and differing perceptions of social norms. In this study, we directly measure each of these potential mechanisms and compare their mediating roles in the relationship between status and redistribution. In our experiment, participants complete real-effort tasks and then are randomly assigned a high or low pay rate per correct answer to exogenously induce (dis)advantaged status. Participants are then paired and those assigned the role of dictator decide how to divide their joint earnings. We find that advantaged dictators keep more for themselves than disadvantaged dictators and report different fairness views and beliefs about task performance, but not different perceptions of social norms. Further, only fairness views play a significant mediating role between status and allocation differences, suggesting this is the primary mechanism underlying self-serving differences in support for redistribution.

Competitive rewards are often assigned on a regular basis, e.g., in annual salary negotiations or employee-of-the-month schemes. The repetition of competitions can imply that opponents are matched based on earlier outcomes. Using a real-effort experiment, we examine how cheating and effort evolve in two rounds of competitions in which subjects compete with different types of opponents in the second round (random/based on the first-round outcome). We find that (i) losing causes competitors to increase cheating in the second round while winning implies a tendency to reduce cheating. A similar effect is found with regard to effort, as losers increase effort to a larger extent than winners. (ii) Competitor matching does not significantly affect behavior.

This study analyses the relationship between the willingness to take risk (WTR) of a sentimental couple and its individual components. Using a survey-based measure collected in a lab experiment with 126 couples, we estimate a joint model for explaining female, male, and couple WTR. We control for socio-demographic characteristics and personality traits in the individual risk specifications and for the length of the relationship in the joint risk specification. We find that individual WTR is related to personality more than to socio-demographic variables. Couple WTR is equally determined by the individual WTR of each partner, once endogeneity arising from unobservable common factors is considered. This implies that risk-averse (risk-tolerant) individuals appear to be willing to take more (less) risk when behaving with the partner than he/she would like when behaving individually.

This study proposes a conflict between the impulse to express negative emotions and the temptation to behave selfishly in the cognitive control processes of complying with cooperative norms. We conduct an experiment with two tasks (cost and no-cost) in a prisoner’s dilemma game with third-party punishment and apply the transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to modulate the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). The results indicate significant differences in tDCS effects on third-party punishment between two cost conditions. In the no-cost task, third parties in the cathodal condition report higher negative emotional responses and assign more punishment to norm violators than those in the sham condition. However, the tDCS effect on third-party punishment is not significant in the cost task. Our results help address the inconsistent findings in prior literature regarding the role of the right DLPFC in norm compliance and deepen our understanding of the cognitive control process in enforcing cooperative norms by third parties.

We elicit and compare behaviors in the laboratory and on a smartphone application that we developed for this study. Our participant pool consists of university students who are subjected to identical incentives and selection criteria. Behavior is similar across samples in measures of attitudes towards risk, effort, cognitive ability, strategic reasoning, trust, and lying aversion. Additionally, participants show comparable beliefs about the actions of the other players. We also identify certain quantitative differences between the two groups. Specifically, subjects using the app donate more in the dictator game, are faster, and show less consistency. These findings show the potential of using smartphone applications to organize experiments, and emphasize the importance of a clear and simple interface in this environment.

Literature suggests that human perception and behavior vary with physical temperature. We conducted an experiment to study how different ambient temperatures impact social behavior and perception: subjects undertook a series of tasks measuring various aspects of social behavior and perception under three temperature conditions (cold vs. optimal vs. warm). Despite well-established findings on the effects of temperature, our data suggest that ambient temperature has no relevant influence on social behavior and perception. We corroborate our finding of a null effect using equivalence testing and provide a discussion considering recent failed replication attempts in this field of research and related studies on heat and violence.

We investigate the effect of prosocial rewards on goal-setting and performance of women. We designed an online experiment where participants performed real-effort tasks. In our experimental treatments, participants were asked to set their own goals as to how many tasks they would perform within a fixed time frame. Contrary to previous research indicating that women tend to underperform due to setting lower goals for themselves compared to men, our study demonstrates that when rewards are prosocial, women set challenging, but achievable and their performance improves. Our results suggest that prosocial incentives within the goal-setting scheme can be an effective way to help women improve their performance.