Papers - Artefactual

Steffen Andersen, Erwin Bulte, Uri Gneezy, John A List

Cited by*: 16 Downloads*: 27

No abstract available

David S Brookshire, Donald L Coursey, Howard Kunreuther

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 27

No abstract available

Christopher Blattman, Julian C. Jamison, Margaret Sheridan

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 26

We show that a number of "non cognitive" skills and preferences, including patience and identity, are malleable in adults, and that investments in them reduce crime and violence. We recruited criminally-engaged men and randomized half to eight weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy designed to foster self-regulation, patience, and a noncriminal identity and lifestyle. We also randomized $200 grants. Cash alone and therapy alone initially reduced crime and violence, but effects dissipated over time. When cash followed therapy, crime and violence decreased dramatically for at least a year. We hypothesize that cash reinforced therapy's impacts by prolonging learning-by-doing, lifestyle changes, and self-investment.

Laura Schechter

Cited by*: 20 Downloads*: 25

Play in the traditional trust experiment depends both on trust beliefs and on levels of risk aversion. We ran two experiments with a diverse set of subjects in fifteen villages of rural Paraguay, the traditional trust experiment and a new experiment measuring only risk aversion. We find that risk attitudes are highly predictive of play in the trust game. In addition, omitting risk aversion as a regressor in trust regressions signficiantly changes the coefficients of important explanatory variables such as gender and wealth. We also use data on income and bet choice to calculate players' coefficients of relative risk aversion.

Steven D Levitt, John A List, Sally Sadoff

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 25

Although backward induction is a cornerstone of game theory, most laboratory experiments have found that agents are not able to successfully backward induct. We analyze the play of world-class chess players in the centipede game, which is ill-suited for testing backward induction, and in pure backward induction games--Race to 100 games. We find that chess players almost never play the backward induction equilibrium in the centipede game, but many properly backward induct in the Race to 100 games. We find no systematic within-subject relationship between choices in the centipede game and performance in pure backward induction games.

Jeff P Carpenter, Amrita Daniere, Lois Takahashi

Cited by*: 53 Downloads*: 25

We conduct experiments in urban slums to measure trust and cooperation and to see how behavior varies with demographic factors and associational measures of social capital. Overall, we find high contribution rates among Thai and Vietnamese participants in a voluntary contribution game, and we see that many participants are willing to signal their disapproval of free riding despite it being costly to do so. At the individual level, we find that behavior varies with many demographic factors and with many associational factors. However, these correlations often differ significantly between our two locations, indicating the role of culture, defined broadly.

Joseph Henrich

Cited by*: 43 Downloads*: 24

No abstract available

Ronald G Cummings, Paul J Ferraro

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 24

Economists have paid increasing attention to the role of cultural diversity in explaining the variability of economic outcomes across societies. We develop an experimental framework that complements existing research in this area. We implement the framework with two cultures that coexist in an industrialized society: the Hispanic and Navajo cultures in the southwestern United States. We vary the ethnic mix of our experimental sessions in order to infer the effect of intercultural interactions on economic behavior and outcomes. We control for demographic differences in our subject pools and elicit beliefs directly in order to differentiate between statistical discrimination and preference-based discrimination. We present clear evidence that Hispanic and Navajo subjects behave differently and that their behavior is affected by the ethnic composition of the experimental session. Our experimental framework has the potential to shed much needed light on economic behavior and outcomes in societies of mixed ethnicity, race and religion.

Glenn W Harrison, Steven J Humphrey, Arjan Verschoor

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 24

We review experimental evidence collected from risky choice experiments using poor subjects in Ethiopia, India and Uganda. Using these data we estimate that just over 50% of our sample behaves in accordance with expected utility theory and that the rest subjectively weight probability according to prospect theory. Our results show that inferences about risk aversion are robust to whichever model we adopt when we estimate each model separately. However, when we allow both models to explain portions of the data simultaneously, we infer risk aversion for subjects behaving according to expected utility theory and risk seeking behavior for subjects behaving according to prospect theory. We conclude that the current practice of designing policies under the assumption that one or other explains all behavior is fundamentally flawed.

William T Harbaugh, Kate Krause

Cited by*: 46 Downloads*: 23

We examine the development of altruistic and free-riding behavior in 6-12-year-old children. We find that the level of altruistic behavior in children is similar to that of adults but that repetition has a different effect. Younger children's contributions tend to increase in later rounds of the experiments, whereas the contributions of older children, like those of adults, tend to decline. Group attachment is associated with higher contributions. Contributions in a subsequent dictator experiment are correlated with first-roundn contributions in the public good experiment, but are not strongly correlated with last-round contributions.

Jim Engle-Warnick, Javier Escobal, Sonia Laszlo

Cited by*: 4 Downloads*: 23

No abstract available

Vegard Iversen, Cecile Jackson, Bereket Kebede, Alistair Munro, Arjan Verschoor

Cited by*: 7 Downloads*: 23

We test core theories of the household using variants of a public good game and experimental data from 240 couples in rural Uganda. Spouses do not maximise surplus from cooperation and realise a greater surplus when women are in charge. This violates assumptions of unitary and cooperative models. When women control the common account, they receive less than when men control it; this contradicts standard bargaining models. Women contribute less than men and are rewarded more generously by men than vice versa. This casts doubt on postulates in Sen (1990). While the absence of altruism is rejected, we find evidence for opportunism. The results are put in a socioeconomic context using quantitative and qualitative survey data. Assortative matching and correlates of bargaining power influence behaviour within the experiments. Our findings suggest that a one-size fits all?? model of the household is unlikely to be satisfactory.

Glenn W Harrison, Morten I Lau, Elisabet E Rutstrom

Cited by*: 14 Downloads*: 22

Evidence that individuals have dynamically consistent preferences is usually generated by studying the discount rates of the individual over different horizons, but where those rates are elicited at a single point in time. If these elicited discount rates vary by horizon, the individual is typically claimed to have preferences that imply a dynamic inconsistency, although this inference requires additional assumptions such as intertemporal separability. However, what one really wants to know is if the same subject has the same discount rate function when that individual is asked at a later point in time. Such panel tests then require that one allow for possible changes in the states of nature that the subject faces, since they may confound any in-sample comparisons of discount rate functions at different points in time. We report the results of a large-scale panel experiment undertaken in the field that allows us to examine this issue. In June 2003, we elicited subjective discount rates from 253 subjects, representative of the adult Danish population. Between September 2003 and November 2004, we re-visited 97 of these subjects and repeated these tasks. In each visit, we also elicited information on their individual characteristics, as well as their expectations about the state of their own economic situation and macroeconomic variables. We find evidence in favor of dynamic consistency.

Juan-Camilo Cardenas

Cited by*: 2 Downloads*: 22

No abstract available

Werner Guth, Carsten Schmidt, Matthias Sutter

Cited by*: 21 Downloads*: 21

On 11 May 2001, readers of the Berliner Zeitung were invited to participate in an ultimatum bargaining experiment played in the strategy vector mode: each participant chooses not only how much (s)he demands of the DM1,000 pie but also which of the nine possible offers of DM100, 200, ..., 900 (s)he would accept or reject. In addition, participants were asked to predict the most frequent type of behavior. Three randomly selected proposer-responder pairs were rewarded according to the rules of ultimatum bargaining and three randomly chosen participants of those who predicted the most frequent type of behavior received a prize of DM500. Decisions could be submitted by mail, fax or via the internet. Behavior is described, statistically analyzed and compared to the usual laboratory ultimatum bargaining results.

John A List, Charles F Mason

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 20

Are individuals expected utility maximizers? This question represents much more than academic curiosity. In a normative sense, at stake are the fundamental underpinnings of the bulk of the last half-century's models of choice under uncertainty. From a positive perspective, the ubiquitous use of benefit-cost analysis across government agencies renders the expected utility maximization paradigm literally the only game in town. In this study, we advance the literature by exploring CEO's preferences over small probability, high loss lotteries. Using undergraduate students as our experimental control group, we find that both our CEO and student subject pools exhibit frequent and large departures from expected utility theory. In addition, as the extreme payoffs become more likely CEOs exhibit greater aversion to risk. Our results suggest that use of the expected utility paradigm in decision making substantially underestimates society's willingness to pay to reduce risk in small probability, high loss events.

John A List

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 19

No abstract available

Glenn W Harrison

Cited by*: 5 Downloads*: 19

If we are to examine the role of "controls" in different experimental settings, it is appropriate that the word be defined carefully. The Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition) defines the verb "control" in the following manner: "To exercise restraint or direction upon the free action of; to hold sway over, exercise power or authority over; to dominate, command." So the word means something more active and interventionist than is suggested by it's colloquial clinical usage. Control can include such mundane things as ensuring sterile equipment in a chemistry lab, to restrain the free flow of germs and unwanted particles that might contaminate some test.

Craig E Landry, Andreas Lange, John A List, Michael K Price, Nicholas G Rupp

Cited by*: 18 Downloads*: 17

This study develops theory and conducts an experiment to provide an understanding of why people initially give to charities, why they remain committed to the cause, and what factors attenuate these influences. Using an experimental design that links donations across distinct treatments separated in time, we present several insights. For example, we find that previous donors are more likely to give, and contribute more, than donors asked to contribute for the first time. Yet, how these previous donors were acquired is critical: agents who are initially attracted by signals of charitable quality transmitted via an economic mechanism are much more likely to continue giving than agents who were initially attracted by non-mechanism factors.

Werner Guth, Carsten Schmidt, Matthias Sutter

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 17

5,132 readers of the German weekly, Die Zeit, participated in a three-person bargaining experiment. In our data analysis we focus on (1) the influence of age, gender, profession and medium chosen for participation and (2) the external validity of student behaviour (inside and outside the lab). We find that older participants and women care more about equal distributions and that Internet users are more self-regarding than those using mail or fax. Decisions made by students in the lab are rather similar to those made by participants in the newspaper experiment, indicating a high degree of external validity of student data.