0000000000382717
AUTHOR
Penélope Hernández
Strategic sharing of a costly network
We study minimum cost spanning tree problems for a set of users connected to a source. Prim’s algorithm provides a way of finding the minimum cost tree mm. This has led to several definitions in the literature, regarding how to distribute the cost. These rules propose different cost allocations, which can be understood as compensations and/or payments between players, with respect to the status quo point: each user pays for the connection she uses to be linked to the source. In this paper we analyze the rationale behind a distribution of the minimum cost by defining an a priori transfer structure. Our first result states the existence of a transfer structure such that no user is willing to …
Conflict and segregation in networks: An experiment on the interplay between individual preferences and social influence
We examine the interplay between a person's individual preference and the social influence others exert. We provide a model of network relationships with conflicting preferences, where individuals are better off coordinating with those around them, but where not all have a preference for the same action. We test our model in an experiment, varying the level of conflicting preferences between individuals. Our findings suggest that preferences are more salient than social influence, under conflicting preferences: subjects relate mainly with others who have the same preferences. This leads to two undesirable outcomes: network segregation and social inefficiency. The same force that helps peopl…
Sequential versus Simultaneous Schelling Models: Experimental Evidence
This article shows the results of experiments where subjects play the Schelling’s spatial proximity model. Two types of experiments are conducted: one in which choices are made sequentially and a variation of the first where the decision making is simultaneous. The results of the sequential experiments are identical to Schelling’s prediction: subjects finish in a segregated equilibrium. Likewise, in the variant of the simultaneous decision experiment, the same result is reached: segregation. Subjects’ heterogeneity generates a series of focal points in the first round. To locate themselves, subjects use these focal points immediately, and as a result, the segregation takes place again. Fur…
Hierarchy is Detrimental for Human Cooperation
Studies of animal behavior consistently demonstrate that the social environment impacts cooperation, yet the effect of social dynamics has been largely excluded from studies of human cooperation. Here, we introduce a novel approach inspired by nonhuman primate research to address how social hierarchies impact human cooperation. Participants competed to earn hierarchy positions and then could cooperate with another individual in the hierarchy by investing in a common effort. Cooperation was achieved if the combined investments exceeded a threshold, and the higher ranked individual distributed the spoils unless control was contested by the partner. Compared to a condition lacking hierarchy, c…
Guanxi, performance and innovation in entrepreneurial service projects.
This paper analyzes the role played by two dimensions of entrepreneurs’ private social capital in the survival, growth and innovativeness of entrepreneurial service ventures: local size and preferential attachment degree. We build a bi-dimensional measure of social capital based on network models and a methodology to estimate this measure for any group of entrepreneurs. Based on a survey of service entrepreneurs who launched their business in the city of Shanghai, we show that roles played by each dimension are quite different. A large local size of the network increases the chances of survival of the new venture. However, the chance to become a dynamic venture is only related to entreprene…
Measuring value levers: Experimental and contingent approaches
Abstract This paper compares two alternative methodologies—the experimental–behavioral approach and the contingent approach—for measuring the value that an attribute of a good (product or service) creates for potential customers. In the experimental–behavioral methodology, potential buyers make actual purchase decisions by receiving financial incentives. In the contingent approach, commonplace in marketing research and purchase decisions are hypothetical. A case–control experiment shows that both methodologies discriminate between key and less relevant attributes in purchase decisions, and provide reliable qualitative information on the value of an attribute. Contingent methodologies fail, …
Strategic behaviour in Schelling dynamics: Theory and experimental evidence
In this paper we experimentally test Schelling's (1971) segregation model and confirm the striking result of segregation. In addition, we extend Schelling's model theoretically by adding strategic behavior and moving costs. We obtain a unique subgame perfect equilibrium in which rational agents facing moving costs may find it optimal not to move (anticipating other participants' movements). This equilibrium is far from full segregation. We run experiments for this extended Schelling model, and find that the percentage of strategic players dramatically increases with the cost of moving and that the degree of segregation depends on the distribution of strategic subjects.
Codification schemes and finite automata
This paper is a note on how Information Theory and Codification Theory are helpful in the computational design both of communication protocols and strategy sets in the framework of finitely repeated games played by boundedly rational agents. More precisely, we show the usefulness of both theories to improve the existing automata bounds of Neyman¿s (1998) work on finitely repeated games played by finite automata.
Large scale and information effects on cooperation in public good games
AbstractThe problem of public good provision is central in economics and touches upon many challenging societal issues, ranging from climate change mitigation to vaccination schemes. However, results which are supposed to be applied to a societal scale have only been obtained with small groups of people, with a maximum group size of 100 being reported in the literature. This work takes this research to a new level by carrying out and analysing experiments on public good games with up to 1000 simultaneous players. The experiments are carried out via an online protocol involving daily decisions for extended periods. Our results show that within those limits, participants’ behaviour and collec…
Robots, labor markets, and universal basic income
Automation is a big concern in modern societies in view of its widespread impact on many socioeconomic issues including income, jobs, and productivity. While previous studies have concentrated on determining the effects on jobs and salaries, our aim is to understand how automation affects productivity, and how some policies, such as taxes on robots or universal basic income, moderate or aggravate those effects. To this end, we have designed an experiment where workers make productive effort decisions, and managers can choose between workers and robots to do these tasks. In our baseline treatment, we measure the effort made by workers who may be replaced by robots, and also elicit firm repla…
Heterogeneous network games: Conflicting preferences
Proceeding at: 2nd Annual UECE Lisbon Meeting: Game Theory and Applications, took place 2010, November, 4-6, in Lisbon (Portugal). The event Web site http://pascal.iseg.utl.pt/~uece/lisbonmeetings2010/ In many economic situations, a player pursues coordination or anti-coordination with her neighbors on a network, but she also has intrinsic preferences among the available options. We here introduce a model which allows to analyze this issue by means of a simple framework in which players endowed with an idiosyncratic identity interact on a social network through strategic complements or substitutes. We classify the possible types of Nash equilibria under complete information, finding two thr…
Guanxi, performance and innovation in entrepreneurial service projects
PurposeThis paper aims to analyze the role played by two dimensions of entrepreneurs' private social capital in the survival, growth and innovativeness of entrepreneurial service ventures: local size and preferential attachment degree.Design/methodology/approachData were collected by a questionnaire, the unit of investigation being the private entrepreneur in the service sector in the city of Shanghai. The questionnaire allows the authors to identify the social network of the entrepreneurs, estimate the empirical degree distribution for the entire sample, and estimate local size and preferential attachment degree.FindingsThere is empirical evidence that entrepreneurs do not create social ne…
Nash codes for noisy channels
This paper studies the stability of communication protocols that deal with transmission errors. We consider a coordination game between an informed sender and an uninformed decision maker, the receiver, who communicate over a noisy channel. The sender's strategy, called a code, maps states of nature to signals. The receiver's best response is to decode the received channel output as the state with highest expected receiver payoff. Given this decoding, an equilibrium or "Nash code" results if the sender encodes every state as prescribed. We show two theorems that give sufficient conditions for Nash codes. First, a receiver-optimal code defines a Nash code. A second, more surprising observati…
A formal model based on Game Theory for the analysis of cooperation in distributed service discovery
New systems can be designed, developed, and managed as societies of agents that interact with each other by offering and providing services. These systems can be viewed as complex networks where nodes are bounded rational agents. In order to deal with complex goals, they require cooperation of the other agents to be able to locate the required services. The aim of this paper is formally and empirically analyze under which circumstances cooperation emerges in decentralized search of services. We propose a repeated game model that formalizes the interactions among agents in a search process where agents are free to choose between cooperate or not in the process. Agents make decisions based on…
Plataforma d'autoavaluació per a Teoria Econòmica
La constatación de los importantes cambios en relación a la docencia que implica el proceso de Bolonia y la soledad en la que tales transformaciones deben llevarse a cabo por parte del profesorado, impulsó a un grupo de profesores de diversas universidades públicas españolas a plantear la oportunidad/necesidad de que los docentes intercambiaran opiniones y experiencias en el ámbito docente, al igual que se hace en el ámbito de investigación. Todo ello se realizón en seno de unas Jornadas de Docencia celebradas en Granada. Este artículo revisa los principales resultados de esta experiencia docente.
Do individuals with higher cognitive ability play more strategically?
Abstract This paper experimentally analyses the relationship between cognitive ability and strategic behaviour. In our experiment, individuals play in a sequential game, where computing the equilibrium is challenging. On completion of the game, we measure each player’s cognitive ability using Raven’s Progressive Matrices test. Our results reveal that the number of strategic decisions (played in the sequential game) increases significantly among those individuals with higher cognitive ability (measured by Raven’s test), compared to those with lower cognitive ability. These results clearly confirm that individuals with higher cognitive abilities play more strategically.
Una aproximación poliédrica al concepto microeconómico
Este articulo propone un enfoque tridimensional de cualquier concepto en Microeconomia y analiza las implicaciones de esta multidimensionalidad en el proceso de aprendizaje-ensenanza de la microeconomia en educacion universitaria. Las tres facetas del aprendizaje presentadas son la experiencial-vivencial, la grafico-geometrica y la matematico-formal. En cada una de ellas el lenguaje utilizado es diferente y el paso entre las tres facetas conforman el camino apropiado para la adquisicion profunda del concepto microeconomico a estudio. Se incorpora ademas dos casos donde se ilustra el metodo de la aproximacion poliedrica de dos conceptos microeconomicos estandar en los programas de Introducci…
¿Cómo cooperan los estudiantes de primero de ADE? Trabajo en equipo: diseño basado en Economía Experimental
En este trabajo presentamos el diseno y los resultados de un experimento economico realizado por estudiantes de primero del grado de administracion y direccion de empresas en el transcurso de una clase practica de la asignatura transversal de incorporacion a los estudios universitarios. Los estudiantes tomaron sus decisiones en un marco donde coexisten los conflictos individuales con los colectivos. El efecto del grupo les ilustro el efecto de la coordinacion y del trabajo en equipo. El principal objetivo de esta actividad es desarrollar y evaluar la competencia de trabajo en equipo, asi como la responsabilidad social, capacidad reflexiva y actitud critica de los estudiantes.
An entropy-based machine learning algorithm for combining macroeconomic forecasts
This paper applies a Machine Learning approach with the aim of providing a single aggregated prediction from a set of individual predictions. Departing from the well-known maximum-entropy inference methodology, a new factor capturing the distance between the true and the estimated aggregated predictions presents a new problem. Algorithms such as ridge, lasso or elastic net help in finding a new methodology to tackle this issue. We carry out a simulation study to evaluate the performance of such a procedure and apply it in order to forecast and measure predictive ability using a dataset of predictions on Spanish gross domestic product.
Nudging to prevent the purchase of incompatible digital products online: An experimental study.
Ensuring safe and satisfactory online shopping activity, especially among vulnerable consumers such as elderly and less educated citizens, is part of a larger set of consumer policy objectives seeking to strengthen trust in the electronic marketplace. This article contributes to that goal by testing the effectiveness of nudges intended to prevent the purchase of 'incompatible' digital products (i.e., those which cannot be used with the devices owned by consumers or the systems they operate). We ran a computerised lab experiment (n = 626) examining three types of nudges, the effects of age and education, and interaction effects between these variables and the nudges. Results show that emotiv…
Equilibrium characterization of networks under conflicting preferences
In this work we characterize equilibrium introduced in configurations for networks with conflicting preferences. We use the model Hernandez et al. (2013) to study the effect of three main factors: the strength of individual preferences, the level of integration in the network, and the intensity of conflict in the population. Our aim is to understand how likely is it that social outcomes are either those in which preferences dominate choices or those in which some individuals sacrifice their preferences to achieve consensus with others. Our results show that, the stronger individual preferences, the harder to achieve consensus in choices. However, in cases where the payoff ratio is less extr…
Pragmatic languages with universal grammars
Abstract This paper constructs the equilibrium for a specific code that can be seen as a “universal grammar” in a class of common interest Sender–Receiver games where players communicate through a noisy channel. We propose a Senderʼs signaling strategy which does not depend on either the game payoffs or the initial probability distribution. The Receiverʼs strategy partitions the set of possible sequences into subsets, with a single action assignment to each of them. The Senderʼs signaling strategy is a Nash equilibrium, i.e. when the Receiver responds best to the Senderʼs strategy, the Sender has no incentive to deviate. An example shows that a tie-breaking decoding is crucial for the block…
¿Cómo cooperan los estudiantes de primero de ADE? Trabajo en equipo: diseño basado en Economía Experimental
En este trabajo presentamos el diseño y los resultados de un experimento económico realizado por estudiantes de primero del grado de administración y dirección de empresas en el transcurso de una clase práctica de la asignatura transversal de incorporación a los estudios universitarios. Los estudiantes tomaron sus decisiones en un marco donde coexisten los conflictos individuales con los colectivos. El efecto del grupo les ilustró el efecto de la coordinación y del trabajo en equipo. El principal objetivo de esta actividad es desarrollar y evaluar la competencia de trabajo en equipo, así como la responsabilidad social, capacidad reflexiva y actitud crítica de los estudiantes.
Analysing Incentive Strategies to Promote Participation in Crowdsourcing Systems
In this paper, we define two strategies for crowdsourcing systems to encourage users to participate at a cost that is close to the optimal cost for the system. In the scenario considered, the system has temporal constraints and potential participants have dynamic behaviors related to the expected rewards (i.e., users’ expected rewards in exchange of their contributions change over time). We propose and evaluate two types of strategies that promote participation of users through monetary rewards that can change as time passes in order to adapt them to the population dynamic behaviors.
Are social and entrepreneurial attitudes compatible?
PurposeThe aim of this paper is to analyze the compatibility between entrepreneurial and social attitudes. Specifically, it seeks to analyze whether subjects with a more developed economic entrepreneurial attitude exhibit a less social attitude.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology integrates an economic experimental approach with a standard entrepreneurial intention questionnaire to analyze the interaction between entrepreneurial and social self‐perceptions and behavior.FindingsThere is empirical evidence that experimental entrepreneurial behavior (characterized by detecting an opportunity and accepting risk to take an economic advantage from it in laboratory experiments) reduces the …
Bounded Computational Capacity Equilibrium
We study repeated games played by players with bounded computational power, where, in contrast to Abreu and Rubisntein (1988), the memory is costly. We prove a folk theorem: the limit set of equilibrium payoffs in mixed strategies, as the cost of memory goes to 0, includes the set of feasible and individually rational payoffs. This result stands in sharp contrast to Abreu and Rubisntein (1988), who proved that when memory is free, the set of equilibrium payoffs in repeated games played by players with bounded computational power is a strict subset of the set of feasible and individually rational payoffs. Our result emphasizes the role of memory cost and of mixing when players have bounded c…
Pool punishment in public goods games: How do sanctioners’ incentives affect us?
Abstract Centralized sanctioning in social dilemmas has been shown to increase efficiency with respect to standard decentralized peer punishment. In this context, we explore the impact of sanctioners’ motivations through their payoff scheme, not only on their actions but also on the actions of the monitored individuals. To do so, we compare the implementation of two different payoff schemes for the monitor in a centralized sanctioning framework: (i) a fixed payoff scheme and (ii) a variable payoff scheme contingent on the level of cooperation achieved. We find that providing the sanctioner with a contingent payoff has a negative impact on contributions. This occurs although sanctioners impl…
A non-cooperative approach to the folk rule in minimum cost spanning tree problems
This paper deals with the problem of finding a way to distribute the cost of a minimum cost spanning tree problem between the players. A rule that assigns a payoff to each player provides this distribution. An optimistic point of view is considered to devise a cooperative game. Following this optimistic approach, a sequential game provides this construction to define the action sets of the players. The main result states the existence of a unique cost allocation in subgame perfect equilibria. This cost allocation matches the one suggested by the folk rule. The authors thank the support of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Compe…
Modeling Local Social Migrations: A Cellular Automata Approach
In local social migrations, agents move from their initial location looking for a better local social environment. Social migrations processes do not change the number of social agents of a given type (i.e., the empirical distribution of the population) but their spatial location. Although cellular automata seems to appear as a natural approach to model of social migrations, the evolution of the configuration through a cellular automata might induce a new configuration wherein the number of agents of each type might be actually modified. This article provides a characterization of these cellular automata rules such that for any initial empirical distribution, the evolution of the configurat…
Building emotional agents for strategic decision making
Experimental economics has many works that demonstrate the influence of emotions and affective issues on the process of human strategic decision making. Personality, emotions and mood produce biases on what would be considered the strategic solution (Nash equilibrium) to many games. %CAMBIO% Thus considering these issues on simulations of human behavior may produce results more aligned with real situations. We think that computational agents are a suitable %CAMBIO% technology to simulate such phenomena. We propose to use O3A, an Open Affective Agent Architecture to model rational and affective agents, in order to perform simulations where agents must take decisions as close as possible to h…