Search results for "Experimental Economics"
showing 10 items of 31 documents
Pool punishment in public goods games: How do sanctioners’ incentives affect us?
2021
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…
Carry a big stick, or no stick at all
2016
We investigate the effect of costly punishment in a trust game with endowment heterogeneity. Our findings indicate that the difference between the investor and the allocator’s initial endowments determines the effect of punishment on trust and trustworthiness. Punishment fosters trust only when the investor is wealthier than the allocator. Otherwise, punishment fails to promote trusting behavior. As for trustworthiness, the effect is just the opposite. The higher the difference between the investor and the allocator’s initial endowments, the less willing allocators are to pay back. We discuss the consistency of our findings with social preference models (like inequality aversion, reciprocit…
Shame in decision making under risk conditions: Understanding the effect of transparency.
2017
The role played by the emotion of shame in the area of decision-making in situations of risk has hardly been studied. In this article, we show how the socio-moral emotions and the anticipated feeling of shame associated with different options can determine our decisions, even overriding the cognitive choice tendency proposed by the certainty effect. To do so, we carried out an experiment with university students as participants, dividing them into four experimental conditions. Our findings suggest that people avoid making unethical decisions, both when these decisions are made public to others and when they remain in the private sphere. This result seems to indicate that the main factor in …
Are Low Prices Compromises Collusion Guarantees? An Experimental Analysis of Price Matching Policies
2001
In this paper we experimentally test the ability of Price-Matching Guarantees (PMG) to rise prices above the competitive level. We implement three different treatments of symmetric duopolies to check the effect of PMG both as a market institution and as a business strategy. In the absence of any low-price guarantee, prices get close to the Bertrand-Nash equilibrium although in the 50 rounds of the experiment no full convergence is obtained. The existence of PMG as an institution in a market where firms decide only about prices results in a clear collusive outcome as all markets quickly and fully converge to the collusive prediction. If we allow subjects to decide whether they adopt price ma…
Toward Value Co-Creation: Increasing Women’s Presence in Management Positions through Competition against a Set Target
2017
Despite empirical evidence that women’s presence in management positions is a source of value co-creation for firms, these positions are still male-dominated. Some evidence from experimental economics suggests that one reason for this imbalance is that women shy away from competition. However, most of these studies have focused on competition systems that pit individuals against each other. We present an economic laboratory experiment that compares competition against others with competition against a set target. The crucial difference is that whereas the former involves competing against opponents, the latter does not. Our results show that significantly more women are willing to compete a…
Gender Behavioral Issues and Entrepreneurship
2017
Women, despite the fact that they make up around 50% of the world’s population, own and manage significantly fewer businesses than men worldwide. Previous empirical research indicates that the gender gap in entrepreneurial propensity mainly comes from subjective perceptions as self-confidence in one’s own skills and fear of failure, and from women’s lower exposure to other entrepreneurs. In this chapter we present laboratory economic experiments that study, under controlled conditions, subjective perceptions of women and men that seem to affect entrepreneurial propensity. The results of the reviewed experiments indicate that correcting factors such as self-confidence is possible (due to its…
Punishment and efficiency: theoretical and experimental approaches
2018
Los dilemas sociales se caracterizan por la desalineación de incentivos privados y sociales bajo preferencias egoístas. Mientras el óptimo social se alcanza mediante la implementación de un conjunto particular de acciones, los incentivos individuales mueven a los agentes a comportarse de una manera diferente, lo cual lleva a resultados ineficientes. Un ejemplo clásico es la provisión de un bien público, donde el óptimo se alcanza si todos contribuyen, sin embargo hay una desviación unilateral provechosa a hacer de polizón, es decir, a no contribuir al bien público y beneficiarse de los demás. De este modo, dar a los agentes egoístas la posibilidad de elegir libremente sus asignaciones lleva…
Assortment, but not knowledge of assortment, affects cooperation and individual success in human groups
2017
The success or failure of human collective action often depends on the cooperation tendencies of individuals in groups, and on the information that individuals have about each other's cooperativeness. However, it is unclear whether these two factors have an interactive effect on cooperation dynamics. Using a decision-making experiment, we confirm that groups comprising individuals with higher cooperation tendencies cooperate at a higher level than groups comprising individuals with low cooperation tendencies. Moreover, assorting individuals with similar cooperation tendency together affected behaviour so that the most cooperative individuals tended to cooperate more and the least cooperativ…
Competing Against Simulated Equilibrium Price Dispersions: An Experiment on Internet-Assisted Search Markets
2005
In a four-treatment experiment, we test some of the hypotheses in García-Gallego et al. (2004) concerning competition among a number of firms of which some (or all) are indexed by a price-comparison engine facilitating buyers’ search process. In this paper, we isolate individual behavior from noise due to other players’ actions and learning, facing each subject with simulated rivals whose prices are extracted from mixed strategy equilibrium distributions. We find systematic deviations from both theoretical distributions and previous data obtained in sessions where all players were human. Specifically, departures of experimental data from the corresponding theoretical predictions are enhance…
Reciprocity, matching and conditional cooperation in two public goods games
2005
Previous experimental and empirical evidence has identified social preferences in the voluntary provision of public goods. A number of competing models of such preferences have been proposed. We provide evidence for one model of behavior in these games, reciprocity (or matching, or conditional cooperation). Consistent with previous research, we find that participants in the voluntary contribution mechanism attempt to match the contributions of others in their group. We also examine participants in a related game with different equilibria, the weakest-link mechanism. Here, in contrast, participants contribute so as to match the minimum contribution of others in their group.