Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics最新文献

We report the findings from a study that explores candidate participation in a context where citizens can become candidates under both plurality and run-off voting systems. The study also considers the influence of entry costs and different platforms of potential candidates. While our findings align with the expected outcomes of the citizen-candidate model, there is a notable over-participation by candidates from less favorable electoral positions. These entry patterns adjusted well to the QRE. This research adds to the existing body of knowledge about what motivates candidates to enter races under different voting systems and analyzes the behavior of candidates in extreme positions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how important solidarity and prosocial behavior are in society. However, it is not well understood how solidarity behavior can be encouraged in such extreme cases. This study investigates the effect of activating crisis concerns and contribution information on solidarity perception and behavior using an experimental survey of 1,259 respondents in 2022 from Vietnam. Our findings reveal that (i) there exists a perception-actual behavior gap as the available information is not able to promote solidarity behavior, (ii) activating concerns about the impact of a crisis, i.e., COVID-19, does not trigger prosocial perception and behavior, (iii) contribution information improves solidarity perception, and (iv) females tend to donate more than their male counterparts. When aiming to promote solidarity behavior, it is important to be aware of the prosocial perception-behavior gap, and consider different strategies for males and females, including paying more attention to evoking moral emotions in women.

We employ the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) to assess the effectiveness of two widely applied cognitive manipulations which rely on constraining response times. The CRT measures the ability of a person to resist giving an immediate response that is intuitive but incorrect in favor of greater reflection to find out the correct answer. We have two treatments: a Time Pressure (TP) treatment (provide an answer within 30 s) and a Time Delay (TD) treatment (provide an answer after 60 s). We find that TD increases the frequency of correct answers, while TP increases the frequency of incorrect answers, especially incorrect answers that are not intuitive. Moreover, we confirm the existence of gender biases as already found in other studies. In particular, gender moderates the effects of the experimental treatments: TD increases the frequency of correct answers for males but not for females, while TP increases the frequency of incorrect but less intuitive answers for females but not for males. Our findings provide important insights on the effectiveness of the time manipulations that are widely used in the literature of cognition.

We suggest a simple method to elicit individual preferences for algorithms. By altering the monetary incentives for ceding control to the algorithm, the menu-based approach allows for measuring in particular the degree of algorithm aversion. Using an experiment, we elicit preferences for algorithms in an environment with measurable performance accuracy under two conditions — the absence and the presence of information about the algorithm’s performance. Providing such information raises subjects’ willingness to rely on algorithms when ceding control to the algorithm is more costly than trusting in their own assessment. However, algorithms are still underutilized.

We test the elasticity of people's voting intentions and preferences for redistribution to information about inequality through a large-scale, randomised survey experiment in Indonesia. Respondents received information about either (1) the level of national inequality, (2) the level of national inequality in combination with the degree of intergenerational mobility, (3) their position in the national income distribution, or no information. The first two treatments raised people's concern about inequality and mobility. The first treatment also increased the likelihood they would vote against the President. The third treatment lowered richer respondents’ support for redistribution. These findings provide new insights about the challenges of increasing public support for government-led redistribution, such as tax increases and greater spending on social protection, in middle-income country settings.

I report results of a major online experiment focused on two behavioural mechanisms that might affect long-term saving: impatience (excessive discounting) and distorted beliefs about own longevity. I observe the longevity expectations to be generally reasonable, both in terms of their mean values and their determinants, although the estimates show large variance and, on balance, slight pessimism. In line with previous studies, I find excessive discounting and (self-reported) insufficient retirement saving to be prevalent. Both expectations and excessive discounting affect retirement saving in the natural direction. However, there is no link between these two determinants: neither overly optimistic nor pessimistic predictions concerning own longevity seem to be systematically linked to excessive discounting. Thus, these two behavioural effects neither strengthen nor cancel each other out.

Solar geoengineering denotes a set of technologies that would enable a fast and relatively cheap global temperature reduction. Besides potential physical side-effects, a major concern is the strategic dimension: Who is going to use solar geoengineering and how would it affect others? How does the presence of solar geoengineering change the strategic incentives surrounding other climate policy instruments such as mitigation? We review the existing theoretical and experimental contributions to those questions and outline promising lines of future economic research.

We study experimentally whether and when a shared history of signals affects players’ incentives to cooperate in infinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemmas. We compare games where the player can privately observe imperfect signals about her partner’s actions to games where signals are perfect and games where signals are imperfect but public. Based on evidence from multiple specifications of stage payoffs, we find that when the return to cooperation is low, subjects are more likely to cooperate in games with public signals than in games with private signals. However, when the return to cooperation is high, the difference is not significant. Furthermore, we show evidence that strategies are more lenient with public signals than with private signals when the return to cooperation is low. The results suggest that a shared history of signals could increase players’ incentives to cooperate when the return to cooperation is low.