Social norms involve observation by others and external sanctions for violations, whereas moral norms involve introspection and internal sanctions. To study such norms and their effects, we design a ...laboratory experiment. We examine dictator choices, where we create a shared understanding by providing advice from peers with no financial payoff at stake. We vary whether advice is given, as well as whether choices are made public. This design allows us to explicitly separate the effects of moral and social norms. We find that choices are in fact affected by a combination of observability and shared understanding.
Data, as supplemental material, are available at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.2073
.
This paper was accepted by Teck-Hua Ho, behavioral economics
.
Indirect reciprocity involves cooperative acts towards strangers, either in response to their kindness to third parties (downstream) or after receiving kindness from others oneself (upstream). It is ...considered to be important for the evolution of cooperative behavior amongst humans. Though it has been widely studied theoretically, the empirical evidence of indirect reciprocity has thus far been limited and based solely on behavior in laboratory experiments. We provide evidence from an online environment where members can repeatedly ask and offer services to each other, free of charge. For the purpose of this study we created several new member profiles, which differ only in terms of their serving history. We then sent out a large number of service requests to different members from all over the world. We observe that a service request is more likely to be rewarded for those with a profile history of offering the service (to third parties) in the past. This provides clear evidence of (downstream) indirect reciprocity. We find no support for upstream indirect reciprocity (in this case, rewarding the service request after having previously received the service from third parties), however. Our evidence of downstream indirect reciprocity cannot be attributed to reputational effects concerning one's trustworthiness as a service user.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
In the economic literature, reciprocity is typically studied in situations of repeated interaction between two individuals. It refers to one individual rewarding kind acts of the other or punishing ...hostile acts. In contrast, this paper studies
indirect reciprocity, where a cooperative action is rewarded by a third actor, not involved in the original exchange. We provide experimental evidence on indirect reciprocity. The experiment is based on the ‘repeated helping game’ developed by Nowak and Sigmund (J. Theoret. Biol. 194 (1998) 561; Nature 393 (1998) 573), involving random pairing in large groups. Pairs consist of a donor and a recipient. Donors decide whether or not to provide costly ‘help’ to the recipients they are matched with, based on information about the recipient's behavior in encounters with third parties. We observe clear evidence of indirect reciprocity. Many decision-makers respond to the information about previous decisions (whether or not to help others) of the recipients. In our experiments, this indirect reciprocity is largely based on norms about how often the recipient should have helped others in the past. We show that these norms develop similarly within groups of interacting subjects, but distinctly across groups. This leads to the emergence of group norms.
We experimentally compare three mechanisms used to raise money for charities: first-price winner-pay auctions, first-price all-pay auctions, and lotteries. We stay close to the characteristics of ...most charity auctions by using an environment with incomplete information and independent private values. Our results support theoretical predictions by showing that the all-pay format raises substantially higher revenue than the other mechanisms.
An individual choosing a health insurance policy faces a complex decision environment where a large set of alternatives differ on a variety of dimensions. There is uncertainty and the choice is ...repeated at least once a year. We study decisions and decision strategies in a laboratory experiment where we create a controlled environment that closely mirrors this setting. We use an electronic information board that allows to carefully monitor the individual's decision strategy. The number of alternatives, switching costs, and the speed at which health deteriorates are varied across treatments. We find that most subjects' search is based more on attributes than on policies. Moreover, we find that an increase in the number of alternatives increases decision-making time; makes subjects consider a lower fraction of the available information; makes it more likely that subjects will switch; and decreases the quality of their decisions. The introduction of positive costs of switching makes people switch less often but improves the quality of their decisions. Finally, if health deteriorates only gradually, individuals tend to stick to their current policy too long.
Many people incur costs to reward strangers who have been kind to others. Theoretical and experimental evidence suggests that such "indirect rewarding" sustains cooperation between unrelated humans. ...Its emergence is surprising, because rewarders incur costs but receive no immediate benefits. It can prevail in the long run only if rewarders earn higher payoffs than "defectors" who ignore strangers' kindness. We provide experimental evidence regarding the payoffs received by individuals who employ these and other strategies, such as "indirect punishment," by imposing costs on unkind strangers. We find that if unkind strangers cannot be punished, defection earns most. If they can be punished, however, then indirect rewarding earns most. Indirect punishment plays this important role, even if it gives a low payoff and is rarely implemented.
The artificiality of a laboratory situation is placed in the context of the tension between external and internal validity. Most economists consider internal validity to be most important. A proper ...evaluation of the 'artificiality criticism' (a lack of external validity) requires distinguishing the various goals experimentalists pursue. External validity is relatively more important for experiments searching for empirical regularities than for theory-testing experiments. As experimental results are being used more often in the development of new theories, a methodological discussion of their external validity is becoming more important.
Bidding to give in the field Onderstal, Sander; Schram, Arthur J.H.C.; Soetevent, Adriaan R.
Journal of public economics,
09/2013, Letnik:
105
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In a door-to-door fundraising field experiment, we study the impact of fundraising mechanisms on charitable giving. We approached about 4500 households, each participating in an all-pay auction, a ...lottery, a non-anonymous voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM), or an anonymous VCM. In contrast to the VCMs, households in the all-pay auction and the lottery competed for a prize. Although the all-pay auction is the superior fundraising mechanism both in theory and in the laboratory, it did not raise the highest revenue per household in the field and even raised significantly less than the anonymous VCM. Our experiment reveals that this can be attributed to substantially lower participation in the all-pay auction than in the other mechanisms while the average donation for those who contribute is only slightly (and statistically insignificantly) higher. We explore various explanations for this lower participation and favor one that argues that competition in the all-pay mechanism crowds out intrinsic motivations to contribute.
•We study fundraising mechanisms in a door-to-door fundraising field experiment.•The all-pay auction (APA) is the superior mechanism in theory and in the lab.•In contrast, we find VCMs and a lottery to perform at least as well in the field.•This results from lower participation in APA than in the other mechanisms.•Competition in APA seems to crowd out intrinsic motivations to contribute.
Under full rationality, a labour market tax levied on employers and a corresponding income tax levied on employees are equivalent. With boundedly rational agents, this equivalence is no longer ...obvious. In a real-effort experiment, we study the effects of these taxes on preferences concerning the size of the public sector, subjective well-being, labour supply and on-the-job performance. Our findings suggest that employer-side taxes induce preferences for a larger public sector. Subjective well-being is higher under employer-side taxes while labour supply is lower, at least at the extensive margin. We discuss three mechanisms that may underlie these results.
We use a laboratory experiment to compare the way groups and individuals behave in an inter-temporal common pool dilemma. The experimental design distinguishes between a non-strategic problem where ...players (individuals or groups of three) make decisions without interaction and a strategic part where players harvest from a common pool. This allows us to correct for differences between individuals and groups in the quality of decisions when testing for differences in competitiveness. Group decisions are either made by majority rule or unanimity. The results show that groups are less myopic than individuals (i.e., they make qualitatively better decisions) but that they are more competitive than individuals when placed in a strategic setting. The net result for groups deciding by majority rule is that they make less efficient decisions in the strategic game than individuals do. We are able to show that this is caused by the median voter departing from her original preference in early periods with a shrinking pool. When groups have to make unanimous decisions they start playing the strategic game more efficiently then individuals do, but they rapidly become more competitive with repetition of the game.
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