Journal of Economic Psychology最新文献

Financial well-being is getting more attention in research and consumer policy, but there is limited understanding of its determinants. In this study, the effects of two psychological factors (self-control and future time perspective) are studied on two components of financial well-being (current money management stress and expected future financial security). Using structural equation modelling in data from 16 countries (n = 15,773), we find that self-control and future time perspective have both direct and indirect effects on the components of financial well-being. The indirect effects are mediated by past and present financial behaviour and have smaller effect sizes than the direct effects. Self-control is the main determinant of current money management stress, while future time perspective is the main determinant of expected future financial security. Our results emphasize that financial well-being should not be treated as a one-dimensional construct. Instead, the interventions for improving financial well-being should clearly target either its present or future component and consider psychological characteristics in their design.

People often ignore the real value of money and focus on its nominal value, a phenomenon known as money illusion. In the present study, we conduct two transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) experiments and test the role of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in money illusion. We find that anodal stimulation over the mPFC significantly increases money illusion in an evaluative task, and this anodal stimulation effect can be replicated in an incentivized task in the context of financial choices. Our study sheds light on the neural mechanisms underlying the money illusion.

We replicate the finding of Lefgren et al. (2015) showing that professional basketball coaches in the NBA discontinuously change their starting lineup more often after narrow losses than after narrow wins. This result is consistent with outcome bias because such narrow outcomes are conditionally uninformative. As our paper shows, this pattern is not restricted to the NBA; we also find evidence of outcome bias in the top women’s professional basketball league and college basketball. Finally, we show that outcome bias in coaching decisions generalizes to the National Football League (NFL). We conclude that outcome bias is credible and robust, although it has weakened over time in some instances.

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.