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The project studies people's moral preferences with respect to the dilemma between health and economic outcomes in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. We develop a small-scale survey tool for eliciting and estimating preferences on these outcomes. We test for differences across different population groups -- such as gender, occupation, and political orientation -- as well as at the country level, with the objective of measuring the congruence of the different responses to the pandemic with the citizens' preferences.

This project aims to test in a controlled experimental setting whether aspiration goods, i.e. goods that have not been purchased despite being highly desired, influence the formation of inflation perceptions and expectations. Respondents are randomly assigned to one of 4 experimental conditions resulting from asking the respondents to list 3 goods that in the last 6 months a) have been the most desired Vs. not particularly desired b) have been purchased Vs. not. We then elicit inflation perceptions (past 12 months) and inflation expectations (next 12 months) for all respondents. The combination of being mostly desired and not having been purchased characterizes the aspiration goods and represents our treatment condition. We expect to find that inflation perceptions/expectations are higher in the treatment group. The underlying hypothesized mechanism is that the mismatch between desired and purchased goods can be attributed to a loss of the purchasing power of the currency. The 2x2 factorial design allows us also to investigate how removing only one of the two features (desirability and non-availability) compares with a baseline.

This paper investigates experimentally how the inclination to cheat changes when agents report the result of multiple realizations of a (private information) stochastic event rather than a single outcome. Extreme outcomes clearly signal opportunistic behavior with multiple realizations. The consequent reputation concerns dramatically reduce cheating by large amounts. Multiple draws, however, erode the intrinsic cost of lying, inducing a widespread inclination to slightly misreport the outcomes in a plausible manner. These two opposite effects are similar in magnitude, on average, but show an interesting gender differentiation implying that multiple realizations can be effective with males but may backfire with females.

Gender differences in risk attitudes are frequently observed, although recent literature has shown that they are context dependent rather than ubiquitous. In this paper we try to rationalize the heterogeneity of results investigating experimentally whether the presence of a safe option among the set of alternatives explains why females are more risk averse than males.We manipulate three widely used risk elicitation methods finding that the availability of a safe option causally affects risk attitudes. The presence of a riskless alternative does not entirely explain the gender gap but it has a significant effect in triggering or magnifying (when already present) such differences.Despite the pronounced instability that usually characterizes the measurement of risk preferences, we show, estimating a structural model, that the effect of a safe option is remarkably stable accross tasks. This paper constitutes the first successful attempt to shed light on the determinants of gender differences in risk attitudes.

Gender differences in risk attitudes are frequently observed, although recent literature has shown that they are context dependent rather than ubiquitous. In this paper we try to rationalize the heterogeneity of results investigating experimentally whether the presence of a safe option among the set of alternatives explains why females are more risk averse than males. We manipulate three widely used risk elicitation methods finding that the availability of a safe option causally affects risk attitudes. The presence of a riskless alternative does not entirely explain the gender gap but it has a significant effect in triggering or magnifying (when already present) such differences. Despite the pronounced instability that usually characterizes the measurement of risk preferences, we show, estimating a structural model, that the effect of a safe option is remarkably stable accross tasks. This paper constitutes the first successful attempt to shed light on the determinants of gender differences in risk attitudes.

This paper studies if competition affects subsequent risk-taking behaviour by means of a laboratory experiment that manipulates the degree of competitiveness of the environment under equivalent monetary incentives. We find that competition increases risk aversion, especially for males, but not in a significant manner. When conditioning on the outcome, we find that males become significantly more risk averse after losing the tournament than after randomly earning the same low payoff. In contrast, males do not become more risk-seeking after winning the tournament, while females' average risk-taking behaviour is unaffected by tournament participation and outcomes. We interpret our findings in terms of males' reaction to negative outcomes driven by intrinsic motives, such as emotions or a shift in the locus of control from internal to external.

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It has been shown that subjects tend to follow others' behavior even when the external signals are uninformative. In this paper we go one step further, showing that conformism occurs even when the choices of others are not even presented to the subjects, but just indirectly perceived. We use the "Click" version of the Bomb Risk Elicitation Task, in which subjects can infer the behavior of others only from the mass of clicks heard. This signal is payoff-irrelevant and largely uninformative about the actual choices of the other participants. Moreover, it is never mentioned in the instructions and therefore it must be spontaneously (and possibly unconsciously) perceived in order to be used. We control the exposure of subjects to clicks by implementing treatments with and without earmuffs. Moreover, we test whether the introduction of a minimal form of commonality, i.e., facing a common rather than individual resolution of uncertainty, makes conformism more likely to emerge. We find strong evidence of conformist behavior even in such an adverse environment. Simply hearing the others clicking affects subjects' behavior. Introducing a common random draw results in a further dramatic shift of the average choices, in particular by women.

Evidence of Illusion of Control – the fact that people believe to have control over pure chance events – is a recurrent finding in experimental psychology. Results in economics find instead little to no support. In this paper we test whether this dissonant result across disciplines is due to the fact that economists have implemented only one form of illusory control. We identify and separately tests in an incentive-compatible design two types of control: a) over the resolution of uncertainty, as usually done in the economics literature, and b) over the choice of the lottery, as sometimes done in the psychology literature but without monetary payoffs. Results show no evidence of illusion of control, neither on choices nor on beliefs about the likelihood of winning, thus supporting the hypotheses that incentives crowd out illusion of control.

International audience

International audience