Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization最新文献

What patterns of economic relations arise when people are altruistic rather than strategically self-interested? What are the welfare implications of altruistically-motivated choices of business partners? This paper introduces an altruism network into a simple model of choice among partners for economic activity. With concave utility, agents effectively become inequality averse towards their friends and family. Rich agents preferentially choose to work with poor friends despite productivity losses. These preferential contracts can also align with welfare since the poor benefit the most from income gains and these gains can outweigh the loss in output. Hence, network inequality—the divergence in incomes within sets of friends and family—is key to how altruism shapes economic activity, output, and welfare. When skill homophily —the tendency for friends to have the skills needed for high production—is high, preferential contracts and productivity losses disappear since rich agents have poor friends with the requisite qualifications.

Colonel Blotto games with discrete strategy spaces nicely illustrate the intricate nature of multidimensional strategic reasoning. This paper studies the equilibrium set of such games where, in line with prior experimental work, the tie-breaking rule is allowed to be flexible. We begin by pointing out that equilibrium constructions known from the literature extend to our class of games. However, we also note that, irrespective of the tie-breaking rule, the equilibrium set is excessively large. Specifically, any pure strategy that allocates at most twice the fair share to each battlefield is used with positive probability in some equilibrium. Furthermore, refinements based on the elimination of weakly dominated strategies prove ineffective.

We introduce a model of team formation in which workers first match and then produce correlated signals about an unknown state. While it is efficient to maximize the number of informationally diverse teams, such teams need not form in equilibrium when output is shared equally. Our analysis identifies the two sources of matching inefficiency: (i) workers may form diverse teams that are beneficial to its members, but force excluded workers to form homogeneous teams, and (ii) even when a diverse team is efficient, a worker may prefer to join a homogeneous team if she can exert less effort than her teammate. We completely characterize each inefficiency.

We introduce the conditional acceptance mechanism for solving the course allocation problem under priorities. This mechanism implements the set of stable allocations in both Nash equilibrium and undominated Nash equilibrium when preferences and priorities are substitutable. We model a post-allocation adjustment mechanism using a repeated version of the conditional acceptance mechanism that mitigates the inefficiencies caused by deviating from equilibrium. Both mechanisms are straightforward to implement, simplify the elicitation of students’ preferences, and share features with currently employed course allocation mechanisms.

Rice and wheat are India's staple cereal crops and there is significant regional variation in the suitability to the cultivation of each. Both are so-called ‘plough-positive’ crops, whose cultivation is benefited by ploughing. It has previously been argued that the ancient adoption of the plough, a heavy implement better suited to handling by men, was a factor in the evolution of cultural norms prescribing a domestic role for women in society (Boserup, 1970). This study contends that rice is an anomalous plough-positive crop in that its cultivation, highly labor-intensive, has traditionally required much female labor. This, it is argued, may have led to a local loosening of plough culture's strictures against work by Indian women proportional to the local relative, to wheat, suitability to rice cultivation.

To distinguish between a cultural effect and the technical effect of the labor-intensivity of rice cultivation, this study considers the workforce participation of urban women, spatially removed from agricultural operations. It is found that the district urban female workforce participation rates in both the 2001 and 2011 Censuses of India significantly increase in the district relative suitability to rice cultivation. Further, the increase in the district urban female workforce participation rate between 2001 and 2011 was significantly more pronounced in districts potentially better suited to growing rice than wheat. In addition, analysis of microdata from the 1999–2000 National Sample Survey of Employment and Unemployment reveals that the urban female propensity to work significantly increases in the district relative suitability to rice cultivation, though, tellingly, only so in the case of natives of the district, those whose culture will have been shaped by the local agro-ecology. Finally, urban females principally engaged in domestic duties are likelier to report that they are required to be so occupied, the compulsion probably cultural in nature, the less relatively suitable the district is to rice cultivation, with this effect too confined to natives of the district. Taken together, these findings suggest that rice cultivation has played a cultural role in Indian women's workforce participation.

Informed voters are believed to be essential for elections to function well; however, this belief neglects political candidates’ strategies in response to the changing distribution of voter information. This study shows that increased information can induce polarization even when voters are rational and the information is valuable. We consider an election with policy-motivated candidates and partially informed voters. Voters rely on private signals, the precision of which is regarded as information, to infer their policy preferences. We demonstrate that the changing distribution of information drives mass polarization (i.e., variance in voters’ ideologies) and political polarization (i.e., the distance between policy platforms) even without any changes in voter preferences. In short, when voters become more informed, politics will become more polarized. However, polarization is not necessarily welfare-deteriorating since it provides voters with more choices.

This study leverages daily web-scraped data to evaluate the impact of economic sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on consumer prices and product availability across different goods categories. We find that international sanctions significantly disrupted Russian price dynamics, with the exchange rate serving as the primary transmission mechanism. Utilizing granular online data allows us to circumvent potential misreporting and track real-time economic indicators at high frequency. Our analysis uncovers heterogeneous effects across product groups, with sanctions associated with an average increase of 11.7 percentage points in the Russian CPI. The results highlight how trade policies and geopolitical events can rapidly propagate through retail markets, underscoring the importance of timely price monitoring during periods of economic turbulence. More broadly, we demonstrate the value of online data for evaluating policy shocks, paving the way for similar applications in other contexts.

We study the geographical allocation consequences of minimum wage, using individual-level migration data and the substantial variation over time in minimum wages across 262 counties in China. Our preferred specification shows that a 10% increase in the local minimum wage decreases the probability of outmigration by 1.52 percentage points. Using data from a major online recruitment platform, we further corroborate the main finding by showing that workers are less likely to search for a job in other cities when their city of residence experiences an increase in minimum wage.

Do workers speak their mind about sexism and about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies in the workplace? We measure social desirability bias regarding sexism and DEI policies using a list experiment survey among workers from five male-dominated industries in France and in the US. In both countries and, remarkably, among both men and women, we document substantial social desirability bias. Managers exhibit a larger bias than non-managerial employees. This difference between voiced and real attitudes may make organizations overestimate support for DEI policies in their workforce, rendering such policies less effective.

Colleges compete to attract students by investing in amenities such as athletics, dormitories, and student activities. We examine the effect of student consumption of postsecondary amenities on academic achievement and future donation behavior in the context of Big-Time college sports. We resolve the selection issue using data from a large, public university with a highly-ranked men's basketball team, where student season tickets are awarded by lottery. Game attendance has small negative effects on academic performance but no impact on donation behavior. Negative academic effects are concentrated at the bottom of the achievement distribution.