Papers - All

Erwin Bulte, John A List, Jason F Shogren

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 2

An important public policy question that remains unresolved is whether devolution will enhance sensible policy making by exploiting informational asymmetries or, instead, trigger a "beggar thy neighbor" response and stimulate free riding amongst localities. We analyze this question within the framework of U.S. environmental policy making by scrutinizing a unique panel data set on state-level endangered species expenditure patterns. Our empirical estimates are consistent with the notion that states free ride, which may lead to an expenditure equilibrium that is not Pareto efficient.

Dean S Karlan

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 28

Questions remain as to whether results from experimental economics are generalizable to real decisions in nonlaboratory settings. Furthermore, questions persist about whether social capital helps mitigate information asymmetries in credit markets. I examine whether behavior in two laboratory games, Trust and a Public Goods, predicts loan repayments to a Peruvian group-lending microfinance program. Since this program relies on social capital to enforce repayment, this tests the external validity of the games. Individuals identified as "trustworthy" by the Trust Game are indeed less likely to default on their loans. No similar support is found for the game's identification of "trusting" individuals.

Christopher Mann

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 7

Survey researchers have long been concerned with the question of whether participation in preelection surveys increases voter turnout. This article presents findings from three large-scale field experiments conducted during the 2002 general election in Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania. Unlike early studies, which found that participation in preelection surveys increased voter turnout, this study finds no significant effect. The author argues that the rigorous experimental methodology and large sample size in these three experiments should allay concern that survey participation affects turnout.

Pasquale Marcello Falcone, Enrica Imbert, Andrea Morone, Marcello Morone, Piergiuseppe Morone

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 119

Food security, along with growing population and the associated environmental concerns, make food waste and loss a central topic in economic analysis. While food losses occur mostly at the production, postharvest and processing phases of the supply chain, food waste takes place mainly at the end of the chain and therefore concerns primarily the habits and behaviour patterns of retailers and consumers. Many solutions and practices have been proposed and oftentimes implemented in order to "keep food out of landfills", thus reducing food waste at the source. However, little attention has been paid to the possible sharing of consumer-side food surplus. In this context, food sharing could represent an effective way to tackle food waste at the consumers' level, with both environmental and economic potential positive effects. Currently, several initiatives and start-ups are being developed in the US and Europe, involving the collection and use of the excess of food from consumers and retailers and the promotion of collaborative consumption models (e.g. Foodsharing, Growington, Feastly, etc.). Nevertheless, there is still little empirical evidence testing the effectiveness of introducing sharing economy approaches to reduce food waste. This study seeks to fill this gap through a framed field experiment. We run two experimental treatments; in the control treatment students were asked to behave according to their regular food consumption habits, and in the food sharing treatment the same students were instructed to purchase food, cook and consume it collectively. Preliminary results showed that the adoption by households of food sharing practices do not automatically translate into food waste reduction. A number of factors (environmental and economic awareness, domestic skills and collaborative behaviors) might act as 'enablers' to make sharing practices effective.

John A List, Yana Peysakhovichc

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 5

This paper examines aggregate time series data on individual charitable donations from 1968 to 2007. We find that changes in individual giving show an asymmetric response to changes in the S&P 500: individuals are more responsive to stock market upturns than downturns.

Christina M Fong

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This paper reports a surprising finding from an experiment on giving to welfare recipients. The experiment tests how offers of money in n-donor dictator games are affected by 1) donors' humanitarian and egalitarian values and 2) direct information about the recipients' work-preferences. People who are self-reported humanitarians and egalitarians have giving that is highly elastic with respect to the apparent worthiness of the recipient. Among high scoring humanitarian-egalitarians, the median offer to a recipient who appeared industrious was $5.00, while the median offer to a recipient who appeared lazy was only $1.00. Among low scoring humanitarian-egalitarians, the median offer was $1.00 in both conditions. I refer to this combination of altruism and equity/reciprocity as empathic responsiveness. This finding can be rationalized by a model of inequity aversion.

Jeffrey C Ely, Tanjim Hossain

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We conducted a field experiment to test the benefit from late bidding (sniping) in online auction markets. We compared sniping to early bidding (squatting) in auctions for newly-released DVDs on eBay. Sniping led to a statistically significant increase in our average surplus. However, this improvement was small. The two bidding strategies resulted in a variety of other qualitative differences in the outcomes of auctions. We show that a model of multiple concurrent auctions, in which our opponents are naive or incremental bidders as identified in the lab, explain the results well. Our findings illustrate how the overall impact of naivete, and the benefit from sniping observed in the lab, may be substantially attenuated in real-world market settings.

Daniel Henderson , John A List, Daniel L Millimet, Christopher Parmeter , Michael K Price

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 4

Nonparametric estimators provide a flexible means of uncovering salient features of auction data. Although these estimators are popular in the literature, many key features necessary for proper implementation have yet to be uncovered. Here we provide several suggestions for nonparamteric estimation of first-price auction models. Specifically, we show how to impose monotonicity of the equilibrium bidding strategy; a key property of structural auction models not guaranteed in standard nonparametric estimation. We further develop methods for automatic bandwidth selection. Finally, we discuss how to impose monotonicity in auctions with differering number of bidders, reserve prices, and auction-specific characteristics. Finite sample performance is examined using simulated data as well as experimental auction data.

Uri Gneezy, Andreas Leibbrandt, John A List

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 98

Competitiveness pervades life: plants compete for sunlight and water, animals for territory and food, and humans for mates and income. Here we investigate human competitiveness with a natural experiment and a set of behavioral experiments. We compare competitiveness in traditional fishing societies where local natural forces determine whether fishermen work in isolation or in collectives. We find sharp evidence that fishermen from individualistic societies are far more competitive than fishermen from collectivistic societies and that this difference emerges with work experience. These findings suggest that humans can evolve traits to specific needs, support the idea that socio-ecological factors play a decisive role for individual competitiveness, and provide evidence how individualistic and collectivistic societies shape economic behaviour.

Glenn W Harrison, John A List, Charles Towe

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Does individual behavior in a laboratory setting provide a reliable indicator of behavior in a naturally occurring setting? We consider this general methodological question in the context of eliciting risk attitudes. The controls that are typically employed in laboratory settings, such as the use of abstract lotteries, could lead subjects to employ behavioral rules that differ from the ones they employ in the field. Because it is field behavior that we are interested in understanding, those controls might be a confound in themselves if they result in differences in behavior. We find that the use of artificial monetary prizes provides a reliable measure of risk attitudes when the natural counterpart outcome has minimal uncertainty, but that it can provide an unreliable measure when the natural counterpart outcome has background risk. Behavior tended to be moderately risk averse when artificial monetary prizes were used or when there was minimal uncertainty in the natural nonmonetary outcome, but subjects drawn from the same population were much more risk averse when their attitudes were elicited using the natural nonmonetary outcome that had some background risk. These results are consistent with conventional expected utility theory for the effects of background risk on attitudes to risk.

Alessandra Cassar, Lucas Crowley, Bruce Wydick

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 13

An important question to microfinance is the relevance of existing social capital in target communities to the performance of group lending. This research presents evidence from field experiments in South Africa and Armenia, in which subjects participate in trust games and a microfinance game. We present moderately strong evidence that personal trust between group members and peer homogeneity are more important to group loan repayment than general societal trust or mere acquaintanceship between members. We also find some evidence of reciprocity in groups: those who have been helped by other members are more likely to contribute themselves.

Uri Gneezy, Andreas Leibbrandt, John A List

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 9

The functioning and well-being of any society and organization critically hinges on norms of cooperation that regulate social activities. Empirical evidence on how such norms emerge and in which environments they thrive remains a clear void in the literature. To provide an initial set of insights, we overlay a set of field experiments in a natural setting. Our approach is to compare behavior in Brazilian fishermen societies that differ along one major dimension: the workplace organization. In one society (located by the sea) fishermen are forced to work in groups whereas in the adjacent society (located on a lake) fishing is inherently an individual activity. We report sharp evidence that the sea fishermen trust and cooperate more and have greater ability to coordinate group actions than their lake fishermen counterparts. These findings are consistent with the argument that people internalize social norms that emerge from specific needs and support the idea that socio-ecological factors play a decisive role in the proliferation of pro-social behaviors.

Alex Imas, Sally Sadoff, Anya Samek

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 104

There is growing interest in the use of loss contracts that offer performance incentives as upfront payments that employees can lose. Standard behavioral models predict a tradeoff in the use of loss contracts: employees will work harder under loss contracts than under gain contracts; but, anticipating loss aversion, they will prefer gain contracts to loss contracts. In a series of experiments, we test these predictions by measuring performance and preferences for payoff-equivalent gain and loss contracts. We find that people indeed work harder under loss than gain contracts, as the theory predicts. Surprisingly, rather than a preference for the gain contract, we find that people actually prefer loss contracts. In exploring mechanisms for our results, we find suggestive evidence that people do anticipate loss aversion but select into loss contracts as a commitment device to improve performance.

Daniel Hungerman, Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm

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There are independent literatures in economics considering tax-price and match-price incentives for giving. The match-price literature has produced well-identified small price elasticities, but scholars have widely questioned whether these estimates can inform tax policy. The tax-price literature in contrast has produced a large range of estimates. Here, we explore and compare these different incentives. First, we consider tax incentives for giving by focusing on a state-level tax credit that creates a convex kink. We use traditional, as well as more novel, kink methods to estimate the tax-price elasticity of giving. Second, a subgroup of donors in our data were temporarily offered a match for their gifts, creating an opportunity to compare tax-price and match-price effects for the same group of donors giving to the same organization at the same time. We find the tax-price elasticity is about -.2. The match-price elasticity is essentially the same. Our results thus suggest a small tax-price elasticity, close to the match-price elasticity, and close to match-price elasticity estimates in the experimental match-price literature. The implication is that in the giving environment we investigate the match-price elasticity is informative for tax policy.

Michael Hallsworth, John A List, Robert D Metcalfe, Ivo Vlaev

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 82

Framing remains one of the pillars of behavioral economics. While framing effects have been found to be quite important in the lab, what is less clear is how well evidence drawn from naturally-occurring settings conforms to received laboratory insights. We use debt obligation to the UK government as a case study to explore the 'omission bias' present in decision making with large stakes. Using a natural field experiment that generates nearly 40,000 observations, we find that repayment rates are roughly doubled when the act is reframed as one of commission rather than omission. We estimate that this reframing of the perceived nature of the action generated over $1.3 million of new yield. We find evidence that this behavior may result from a deliberate 'omission strategy', rather than a behavioral bias, as is often assumed in the literature. Our natural field experiment highlights that behavioral economics is much more than a series of empirical exercises to quench the intellectual curiosity of academics.

Patrizia Lattarulo, Marco Mariani, Laura Razzolini

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 117

This paper reports results from a field experiment conducted to study the effect of incentives offered to high school teens to motivate them to visit art museums. A vast literature exists on the design of incentives to modify the behavior of firms and consumers, but not much is known about incentives offered to adolescents and young adults to affect their cultural consumption behavior. Students in the first treatment receive a flier with basic information and opening hours of a main museum in Florence, Italy-Palazzo Vecchio. Students in the second treatment receive the flier and a short presentation conducted by an art expert about the exhibit; students in the third treatment, in addition to the flier and the presentation, receive also a non-financial reward in the form of extra-credit points toward their school grade. The analysis yields two main findings. First, non-financial reward is more effective at inducing the students to undertake the encouraged visit than either the simple presentation or the basic information with the flier. Second, over a longer time horizon the non-financial reward does not induce a significant change in behavior with respect to the simple presentation.

Richard Engelbrecht-Wiggans, John A List, David H Reiley

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 4

My coauthors and I reply to the comments of Daniel Levin on our paper "Demand Reduction in Multiunit Auctions: Evidence from a Sportscard Field Experiment." In his comment, Levin presents new theory and proposes a new equilibrium to explain annomalies reported in our earlier sportscard auction, such as higher first-unit bids under the uniform-price institution. We evaluate his theory and equilibrium in the context of both uniform-price and Vickrey auctions and point out our concerns. Where possible, we attempt to test the predictions of his theory with our existing data.

Nava Ashaf, Xavier Gine, Dean S Karlan

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 41

This paper evaluates a program in Kenya that encourages the production of export oriented crops by providing smallholder farmers with credit linked to agricultural extension and marketing services. We use an experimental design in which farmer selfhelp groups are randomly assigned to either a control group, a group receiving all DrumNet services, or a group receiving all services except credit. Among the services offered by DrumNet, credit is the most important. Since the production of export crops requires a significant investment in capital and inputs, without credit farmers are less likely to plant the mentioned crops. Overall, the results show that DrumNet is an effective model for encouraging the production of export oriented crops.

Juan-Camilo Cardenas, Jeff P Carpenter

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 13

No abstract available

Peter Bohm

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 13

No abstract available