Journal of Economic Psychology最新文献

People tend to discount the value of future rewards as the delay to receiving them increases. This phenomenon, known as temporal discounting, may underlie many impulsive behaviors, such as drug abuse and overeating. Given the potential role of temporal discounting in maladaptive behaviors, many efforts have been made to find experimental manipulations that reduce temporal discounting. One class of manipulations that has held some promise involves recalling positive autobiographical memories prior to making intertemporal choices. Just as imagining positive future events has been shown to reduce temporal discounting, a few studies have shown that recalling positive past events reduces temporal discounting, especially if memory retrieval evokes positive affective states, such as gratitude and nostalgia. However, we failed to replicate these findings. Here we present an internal meta-analysis combining data from 14 studies (n = 758) that involved within-subjects positive memory recall-based manipulations. In each study, temporal discounting was assessed using a monetary intertemporal choice task. The average effect size was not significantly different from zero. This finding helps elucidate the neurocognitive mechanisms of temporal discounting; whereas engaging the episodic memory system to imagine future events might promote more patience, engaging the episodic memory system to imagine past events does not.

In recent years, there has been growing interest in capturing, manipulating, and analyzing the effects of decision-making processes that underlie economic choice. This editorial discusses these recent developments by contextualizing the six contributions to the special issue “Cognition and Economic Behavior” within the broader scope of the existing literature.

In general gender differences have frequently been studied in experimental economics, but the findings remain inconclusive. In this study, we focus on gender differences in expectations and gender specific stereotypic mindsets in a dictator game, building on Blanckenburg, Tebbe, & Iseke (2023). We add to prior work by differentiating between stereotypical behavior and stereotypical expectations. Accordingly, we extended the classic dictator game by three steps in order to study whether recipients develop stereotypical beliefs regarding the dictator’s gender based on the amount of money the dictator has allocated to them. First, we asked recipients to estimate the amount. We then revealed the amount the dictator actually allocated to the recipient and finally, we asked the recipient to assess the dictator’s gender. In contrast to and building on previous results which show no gender differences regarding the amount the dictators allocate, we find evidence for stereotypical expectations of the recipients based on the amount the dictator allocates to them.

Loss aversion is widely regarded as the most robust and ubiquitous finding in behavioural economics. According to the loss aversion hypothesis, the subjective value of losses exceeds the subjective value of equivalent gains. One common assumption in the literature is that this asymmetry represents a fundamental and stable feature of people’s preferences. In cumulative prospect theory, loss aversion is captured by the lambda (λ) parameter, which controls the steepness of the value function for losses. Estimates of λ by Tversky and Kahneman (1992) found evidence for considerable overweighting of losses in risky choice (λ = 2.25). But others find very different levels of loss aversion, with some reporting weak loss aversion or even loss neutrality. In order to assess what is the average level of λ reported in the literature, we set out to conduct a meta-analysis of studies in which λ parameter of the cumulative prospect theory was estimated from individual choices between risky prospects. We draw three conclusions. First, surprisingly few studies have estimated λ by fitting the prospect theory to individual choices between mixed gambles, and there are only a few available datasets suitable to perform model fitting. Second, much of the data are of poor quality, making it impossible to obtain precise estimates of the prospect theory’s parameters. Third, using a random-effect meta-analysis upon the available data, we found a small λ of 1.31, 95 % CI [1.10, 1.53].

We conduct a laboratory experiment to examine gender differences in task choices and competitiveness: Individuals have the option to self-select into one of two stereotypically different tasks and subsequently decide whether or not to engage in competition while receiving one of three different feedback treatments. Compared to a control setting, we study the effect of providing relative performance feedback (rankings), and additionally the effect of providing information about the gender of the competitors. We find a significant gender gap in the choice of the male task, only when presenting the ranking in addition to the gender composition of the group. Turning to the decision to enter competition, we observe that task choice, combined with ranking feedback on performance, reduces the gender gap in competition entry in both tasks compared to the control. The dynamics over treatments reveal that men primarily respond to feedback in the male task, while women respond to feedback in the word task. These findings highlight that gender differences in task choice and competitiveness are contingent on feedback, the underlying task, and the task choice set.

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.

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.

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.

Leveraging the unique context of New York City taxi rides, we estimate that passengers are more likely to tip a suggested amount when presented with an integer tip suggestion, which also corresponds with an increase in average tip rates. We show that these results are not driven by rounding heuristics and are consistent with integers acting as focal points instead of left-digit bias. Focusing on a 2012 rate fare change that increased the probability of integer tip suggestions by 700%, our estimates imply a transfer from riders to drivers of approximately 250,000 dollars in 2013.

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.