Journal of Economic Psychology最新文献

In multi-stage tournaments, anticipated competition in future stages might affect the outcome of competition in the current stage. In particular, the presence of superstars might demotivate the next-best competitors from seeking to advance to later rounds, where they ultimately are likely to face a superstar. Data from men’s professional tennis tournaments held between 2004 and 2019 affirm that the participation of superstars (Djokovic, Nadal, Federer, and Murray) reduces the probability that the remaining Top 20 players win their matches. Such shadow effects arise even in very early tournament stages, in which favoured players lose more often than expected, given their ability. The effects are more pronounced when multiple superstars compete in the tournament and disappear once all superstars have been eliminated from competition. Furthermore, shadow effects increase the probability of retirement of strong but non-superstar competitors and disappear once superstar performance is not dominant.

What personal characteristics are associated with the extent to which individuals discriminate against particular groups? We use an incentive-compatible measure of an individual’s tendency to discriminate on others’ different social identities that takes into account the costs of discrimination. In particular, we elicit participants’ willingness to discriminate (WTD) in their investments to make their decisions dependent on others’ social identities using a laboratory trust game experiment with 545 participants in three countries: Malaysia, China and the UK. Analysis of our WTD measure shows that discrimination differs depending on discriminators’ cultural group identity and political values. Demographic variables including age and gender are not significant. Overall our results support the psychological distinctiveness of WEIRD participants found in other studies.

We report experimental results from a dynamic real-time bargaining experiment. Players earn flows of income from the assets they possess at any point in the bargaining process, while they incur costs which are proportional to the size of the conflict between players’ current claims. We find that most bargaining interactions are characterised by small but non-zero amounts of contention, which arises from the process of tacitly coordinating claims, including from negotiating turn-taking approaches. Interactions with large losses from contention occur in a sizeable minority of interactions. There are significant individual differences in outcomes across participants. We do not find systematic gender effects, but do find that the locus of control of participants predicts bargaining outcomes.

Despite steadily rising inequality in the US over the last few decades, demand for increasing tax rates and redistribution has not increased. A growing literature argues that one reason for this is that people might perceive inequality to be fair. This literature has documented that Americans tend to perceive economic inequality stemming from merit as being fair and inequality stemming from luck as unfair. However, “lucky breaks” in the real world do not necessarily come from a lottery or random chance but from the actions of the government favoring a “lucky” few. People might be more willing to redistribute if it compensates those negatively affected by government action. Using an online experiment we show that luck stemming from the action of a government-like actor influences individuals’ desire to redistribute earnings making them more likely to favor redistribution than in instances where inequality is caused by merit or by random luck.

This paper studies the roles of cognitive and non-cognitive characteristics in a standard Roemerian Inequality of Opportunity (IOP) model. Using Australian microdata, we model the effects of individuals’ backgrounds and their psychological traits on two adult income variables. We find that measurable psychological traits (intelligence, locus of control, big five personality traits) are slightly more important than background characteristics (such as race, gender, social class at birth) in explaining income disparities. However, the fraction of IOP confounded by psychological factors is small (11%–12%), which suggests that background inequalities do not meaningfully reflect differences in cognitive or non-cognitive ability.

Based on the growing evidence on caring and enduring relationships displayed by species across the evolutionary ladder, the ubiquity and importance of environmental uncertainty faced by all organisms, and the adaptational principle that learning may involve preference learning besides instrumental reinforcement learning, this paper proposes a novel information theoretic model of affective bonding, focusing on humans. A special case of the proposed “informational affective tie mechanism” (iATM) turns out to be the model of Bault, Fahrenfort, Pelloux, Ridderinkhof, and van Winden: An affective social tie mechanism, Journal of Economic Psychology, 2017, 61, 152–175. In further contrast to the latter model, the iATM model allows for the role of multiple contexts and distributed attention. Moreover, it provides a dynamic, context related, endogenous representation of the well-known social value orientation construct, facilitating the propagation of caring as observed in the literature. Empirical support is provided along different dimensions. Although the model is not estimated in full detail, a necessary condition regarding its parameters is shown to be fulfilled. Furthermore, experimental findings concerning various well-known games can be tracked under plausible calibration. In addition, the mechanism can be linked to neurobiological evidence concerning maternal (and paternal) care – as the presumed primordial caregiving system – and the signaling role of oxytocin. Finally, the evidence concerning non-human species is addressed, as well as the role of norms and reciprocity.

We present a 12-item scale measuring the cognitive component of economic competence and document the psychometric properties of the scale. Using a data set with >12,000 secondary school students in Germany, the scale shows high discriminatory power and covers a wide range of ability levels. Analyses of ‘Differential Item Functioninǵ show no item bias across key demographic characteristics, and scores show meaningful associations with scores obtained from adjacent test instruments. Student-level correlates mirror estimates documented in earlier literature as well as results relying on a more extensive version of the scale with 31 items. The presented short scale enables researchers and practitioners to efficiently measure economic competence of youth.

The context surrounding a consumer decision, such as one’s overall budget available for purchases, can exert a strong effect on the subjective value of a product. Across three eye-tracking studies, we explore the attentional processes through which budget size influences consumers’ purchasing behavior. Higher budgets increased and sped up purchasing even when items were affordable at all budget sizes. Moreover, attention interacted with budget size to promote purchasing at higher budgets. Finally, individual differences in the magnitude of the budget effect related to attentional patterns: those whose decisions depended more on budget exhibited more budget-price transitions and less variability in search patterns compared to those whose decisions were less dependent on budget. These findings indicate that attention moderates the effect of budgets on purchasing decisions, allowing low budgets to serve as self-control devices and large budgets to generate impulse purchases.

Tax practitioners play a crucial role in the degree of taxpayers’ compliance – a role that has increased as tax systems worldwide have become more complex. However, little is known about tax authorities’ impact on taxpayers’ decisions to employ tax practitioners. Based on earlier research on motivations to employ a tax practitioner and the extended slippery slope framework of tax compliance, we conducted two studies which provide some answers. A survey study – comprising a representative sample of 500 Austrian self-employed taxpayers – revealed that financial gain is not the most important reason to employ a tax practitioner but instead the motivation to avoid problems with the tax authorities. Related to that, we also find that taxpayers’ perception of tax authorities wielding coercive power motivates them to employ tax practitioners. In the interview study with 33 self-employed taxpayers and 30 tax auditors, taxpayers indicated that they sought to avoid contact with tax officers by employing tax practitioners. This finding was supported by tax officers who reported preferring interaction with tax practitioners over direct contact with taxpayers. The two studies point to the complex relationship between taxpayers, tax authorities and tax practitioners, and allow the drawing of theoretical and practical implications.