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We conduct a field valuation experiment where we vary the valuation method (contingent valuation vs. inferred valuation) as well as the payment format (dichotomous choice vs. payment card). Willingness-to-accept and willingness-to-pay valuations are elicited in a within-subjects design for foods with climate neutral labels. We find a similar gap for valuations elicited with the contingent or the inferred valuation method. However, we also find that the gap can be muted by using a payment card elicitation format.

“Site selection bias” can occur when the probability that a program is adopted or evaluated is correlated with its impacts. I test for site selection bias in the context of the Opower energy conservation programs, using 111 randomized control trials involving 8.6 million households across the United States. Predictions based on rich microdata from the first 10 replications substantially overstate efficacy in the next 101 sites. Several mechanisms caused this positive selection. For example, utilities in more environmentalist areas are more likely to adopt the program, and their customers are more responsive to the treatment. Also, because utilities initially target treatment at higher-usage consumer subpopulations, efficacy drops as the program is later expanded. The results illustrate how program evaluations can still give systematically biased out-of-sample predictions, even after many replications.

We present evidence from a natural field experiment designed to shed light on the efficacy of alternative fundraising schemes. In conjunction with the Bavarian State Opera House, we mailed 25,000 regular opera attendees a letter describing a charitable fundraising project organized by the opera house. Recipients were randomly assigned to six treatments designed to explore behavioral responses to fundraising schemes varying in two dimensions: (i) the presence of a lead donor; (ii) whether and how individual donations would be matched using the lead donation. We provide reduced form evidence from the field experiment on the causal impact of each fundraising scheme on the extensive and intensive margins of giving. We then develop and estimate a structural model of giving behavior that simultaneously estimates individual responses on both margins. We utilize the structural model to predict giving behavior in counterfactual fundraising schemes. The evidence suggests the optimal fundraising scheme is one in which the charitable organization merely announces the existence of a significant and anonymous lead donor, and does not use the lead donation to match donations in any way, be it through linear matching, non-linear matching, threshold matching, or some combination of the three. We conclude by discussing evidence from a follow-up field experiment designed to probe further the question why lead donors are effective.

We use an RCT to analyze the impacts of microcredit. The study population consists of loan applicants who were marginally rejected by an MFI in Bosnia. A random subset of these were offered a loan. We provide evidence of higher self-employment, increases in inventory, a reduction in the incidence of wage work and an increase in the labor supply of 16–19-year-olds in the household's business. We also present some evidence of increases in profits and a reduction in consumption and savings. There is no evidence that the program increased overall household income. (JEL C93, G21, I38, J23, L25, P34, P36)

Low-quality infrastructure services are persistent in developing countries, a situation mainly affecting the poorest households in contexts of high rates of informal access and heavily subsidized services. This paper exploits choice experiments, specifically designed for formal and informal users, to examine whether households in this situation are willing to pay for electricity service improvements. The analysis takes place in urban Dominican Republic, a country with one of the highest rates of electricity theft and lowest quality of services. The results strongly indicate that households value service improvements, showing average willingness to pay around US$9 for informal users, and 22 percent for formal users with service deficiencies. The estimated valuations are significantly heterogeneous across households, and such variance is mainly explained by household income, satisfaction with the electricity service, and household characteristics, such as family size and dwelling size. These results indicate substantial welfare losses derived from low-quality electricity services equivalent to over 35 percent of the direct fiscal subsidy to the utilities.

The paper investigates the effect of .99 price endings on consumer demand by means of a field experiment. Results tail behind other contributions showing how .99-endings can be ineffective, casting doubts on their widespread use among retailers. When the .99-ending price is removed an increase of sales emerges from descriptive statistics as well as in a multivariate framework in which sales of the treated item are the only dependent variable. However, such a counterintuitive effect does not survive in a differences-in-differences model in which the daily sales of all the relevant substitutes are jointly analyzed. There is no evidence of any common shock during the treatment. In contrast, a different price-elasticity of demand drives the relative increase of sales of the treated item when prices of the substitutes are on average higher. Once the different reactions to price changes are taken into account, the treated item does not display significantly higher sales as compared to its substitutes when the .99-ending price is removed.

The study describes the complementary benefits of model-building and data analysis using algorithm and statistical modeling methods in the context of unobtrusive marketing field experiments and in transforming findings into isomorphic management models. Relevant for marketing performance measurement, case-based configural analysis is a relatively new paradigm in crafting and testing theory. Statistical testing of hypotheses to learn net effects of individual terms in multiple regression analysis is the current dominant logic. Isomorphic modeling might best communicate what executives should decide using the findings from algorithm and statistical models. We test these propositions using data from an unobtrusive field experiment in a retailing context that includes two levels of expertise, four price-points, and presence versus absence of a friend ("pal" condition) during the customer-salesperson interactions (n=240 store customers). The analyses support the conclusion that all three approaches to modeling provide useful complementary information substantially above the use of one alone and that transforming findings from such models into isomorphic management models is possible.

During the night of April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg on her maiden voyage. Two hours and 40 minutes later she sank, resulting in the loss of 1,501 lives—more than two-thirds of her 2,207 passengers and crew. This remains one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history and by far the most famous. For social scientists, evidence about how people behaved as the Titanic sunk offers a quasi-natural field experiment to explore behavior under extreme conditions of life and death. A common assumption is that in such situations, self-interested reactions will predominate and social cohesion is expected to disappear. However, empirical evidence on the extent to which people in the throes of a disaster react with self-regarding or with other-regarding behavior is scanty. The sinking of the Titanic posed a life-or-death situation for its passengers. The Titanic carried only 20 lifeboats, which could accommodate about half the people aboard, and deck officers exacerbated the shortage by launching lifeboats that were partially empty. Failure to secure a seat in a lifeboat virtually guaranteed death. We have collected individual-level data on the passengers and crew on the Titanic, which allow us to analyze some specific questions: Did physical strength (being male and in prime age) or social status (being a first- or second-class passenger) raise the survival chance? Was it favorable for survival to travel alone or in company? Does one's role or function (being a crew member or a passenger) affect the probability of survival? Do social norms, such as “Women and children first!” have any effect? Does nationality affect the chance of survival? We also explore whether the time from impact to sinking might matter by comparing the sinking of the Titanic over nearly three hours to the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, which took only 18 minutes from when the torpedo hit the ship.

Can one teach basic entrepreneurship skills, or are they fixed personal characteristics? Most academic and development policy discussions about microentrepreneurs focus on their access to credit, and assume their human capital to be fixed. The self-employed poor rarely have any formal training in business skills. However, a growing number of microfinance organizations are attempting to build the human capital of micro-entrepreneurs in order to improve the livelihood of their clients and help further their mission of poverty alleviation. Using a randomized control trial, we measure the marginal impact of adding business training to a Peruvian group lending program for female microentrepreneurs. Treatment groups received thirty to sixty minute entrepreneurship training sessions during their normal weekly or monthly banking meeting over a period of one to two years. Control groups remained as they were before, meeting at the same frequency but solely for making loan and savings payments. We find that the treatment led to improved business knowledge, practices and revenues. The program also improved repayment and client retention rates for the microfinance institution. Larger effects found for those that expressed less interest in training in a baseline survey. This has important implications for implementing similar market-based interventions with a goal of recovering costs.

We investigate profit- maximizing versioning plans for an information goods monopolist. The analysis employs data obtained from a web-based field experiment in which potential buyers were offered information goods in varied price-quality configurations. Maximum simulated likelihood (MSL) methods are used to estimate parameters describing the distribution of utility function parameters across potential buyers of the good. The resulting estimates are used to examine the impact of versioning on seller profits and market efficiency.

The controversy over how much to charge for health products in the developing world rests, in part, on whether higher prices can increase use, either by targeting distribution to high-use households (a screening effect), or by stimulating use psychologically through a sunk-cost effect. We develop a methodology for separating these two effects. We implement the methodology in a field experiment in Zambia using door-to-door marketing of a home water purification solution. We find evidence of economically important screening effects. By contrast, we find no consistent evidence of sunk-cost effects. (JEL C93, D12, I11, M31, O12)

We conducted a natural field experiment to explore the effect of price changes on charitable contributions. To operationalize our tests, we examine whether an offer to match contributions to a non-profit organization changes the likelihood and amount that an individual donates. Direct mail solicitations were sent to over 50,000 prior donors. We find that the match offer increases both the revenue per solicitation and the probability that an individual donates. While comparisons of the match treatments and the control group consistently reveal this pattern, larger match ratios (i.e., $3:$1 and $2:$1) relative to smaller match ratios ($1:$1) had no additional impact. The results have clear implications for practitioners in the design of fundraising campaigns and provide avenues for future empirical and theoretical work on charitable giving. Further, the data provide an interesting test of important methods used in cost-benefit analysis.

We empirically test an information economics based theory of social preferences in which ego utility and self-signaling can potentially crowd out the effect of consumption utility on choices. Two large-scale, randomized controlled field experiments involving a consumer good and charitable donations are conducted using a subject pool of actual consumers. We find that bundling relatively large charitable donations with a consumer good can generate non-monotonic regions of demand. Consumers also self-report significantly lower ratings of “feeling good about themselves” when a large donation is bundled with a large price discount for the good. The combined evidence supports the self-signaling theory whereby price discounts crowd out a consumer’s self-inference of altruism from buying a good bundled with a charitable donation. Alternative theories of motivation crowding are unable to fit the non-monotonic moments in the data. A structural model of self-signaling is fit to the data to quantify the economic magnitude of ego utility and its role in driving consumer decisions.

We run a large field experiment with an online company specializing in selling used automobiles via ascending auctions. We manipulate experimentally the “price grid,” or the possible amounts that bidders can bid above the current standing price. Using two diverse auction sites, one in New York and one in Texas, we find that buyer and seller behavior differs strikingly across the two sites. Specifically, in Texas we find peculiar patterns of bidding among a small but prominent group of buyers suggesting that they are “cyber-shills” working on behalf of sellers. These patterns do not appear in the New York auctions. (JEL C93, D12, D44, L62, L81)

This work examines several psychological mechanisms that motivate the purchase of domestic food products rather than foreign ones. A purposed-made survey was conducted in Germany, Italy and Serbia to investigate the influence of socio-demographic and national contexts on food consumption patterns. The interdisciplinary approach of the present study yields a comprehensive image of consumer preferences, including different perceptions of food standards and requirements. Food quality evaluation, consumer ethnocentrism, nationalism and openness to other cultures are defined, measured and then used to simultaneously explain the intention to purchase domestic food products. Our findings provide insights in the choices of different consumer groups at country level and show that accounting for individual and country characteristics is key to develop effective marketing and communication strategies as well as policy strategies within and across national boundaries.

We demonstrate the benefits and feasibility of using the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism to elicit precise, individual-level willingness to pay and thereby enhance the information generated by randomized experiments. With a relatively small sample and minor modifications to a standard field experiment design, we can directly estimate demand, study the effect of prices on usage through screening and psychological (sunk-cost) effects, and compute heterogeneous marginal treatment effects. Applying the mechanism to a field experiment studying clean drinking water technology in northern Ghana, we show that even in an environment with low literacy and numeracy, BDM produces sensible results. We find that although willingness to pay for clean water technology is low relative to the cost, demand is surprisingly inelastic at low prices; prices do not generate significant sunk-cost effects; and treatment effects are heterogeneous with respect to valuation and consistent with outcomes being affected by effort expenditure.

This paper presents novel tests of competing models of intertemporal consumption behavior using unique European administrative panel data on income, spending and assets. I estimate the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of ‘liquidity’ -the debt response to a change in borrowing capacity- using changes in credit card limits in a randomized controlled trial implemented in September 2014 involving fifty-five thousand individuals. I obtain four empirical results: First, borrowing constraints change consumption dynamics even when they are not strictly binding. Two-thirds of the population accumulate a significant average of 20 cent of debt per dollar limit increase, relative to the control group. Second, the heterogeneity of the MPC is exclusively in line with precautionary models, a decreasing function of cash-on-hand. Third, the debt response to liquidity and credit card utilization are stationary. Fourth, additional liquidity is spent mostly on durables and services using installments, with a smaller fraction spent on non-durables and taken out as cash advances. I then use a workhorse Bewley model with realistic income risk and show that the joint dynamics of consumption, debt and the balance sheet in response to a change in borrowing constraints can be used to calibrate and test intertemporal models. Debt response to liquidity shocks identifies preference parameters via a simulated moments estimator. Hump-shaped debt response and mean-reverting credit card utilization are not consistent with myopia as the underlying preferences.

High profile cases of exploitative labor practices have increased concerns over agricultural working conditions. However, it is unclear whether and to what extent the public is willing to trade-off fair working conditions for higher prices and food imports. We implement a large-scale survey to uncover Greek consumer preferences for a food labeling system that certifies fair working conditions for the workers employed at all production stages of agricultural production. Empirical findings from several disciplines suggest that results from contingent valuation surveys can be susceptible to hypothetical bias, social desirability bias, and lack of consequentiality. To test these issues, we use the 'cheap talk' method (Kling et al., 2012), Lusk and Norwood's (2009) Inferred Valuation (IV) method and the consequentiality scripts employed in Vossler and Evans (2009) and Vossler and Watson (2013). We also test predictions of reference dependent theory by testing whether framing the valuation question as an 'Equivalent Loss' (EL) differs from classical 'Willingness-to-pay elicitation' (WTP). We collected responses from more than 3,800 consumers in the cities of Athens and Ioannina in Greece. Our results show that neither the cheap talk nor the consequentiality script had any effect on elicited valuations. In contrast, the IV method appears to mitigate social desirability bias. We also find that values elicited under WTP are larger than values elicited under EL, which rejects neoclassical preferences. When social desirability is taken out of our estimates, we find that consumers are willing to pay an average premium of 72 cents/Kg for strawberries with fair labor certification, which is equivalent to 49% of current market prices.

We focus on the relationship between pricing of cultural goods and willingness to download their unauthorized versions. Building on equity theory we propose that perceiving a price as overly high provides a self-justification for downloading content from unauthorized sources. In a large-scale online experiment on customers of a major e-book store we employ the Bayesian Truth Serum to induce truthful confessions of acquiring content from unauthorized sources. We confirm that self-reported downloading from unauthorized sources is associated with having experienced overpricing. We also relate it to endorsing relatively positive views on the role of file-sharing services and believing that "pirate's" motives are relatively principled, while those of abstainers are rather pragmatic.

This paper contributes to the debate on front-of-pack nutritional labels. Because of their dissimilar formats, Guideline Daily Amount (GDA) and Traffic Light (TL) may trigger different responses among consumers. While GDA is comprehensive and cognitively demanding, information is coarser and more salient in TL. We implement an incentivized laboratory experiment to assess the relative performance of GDA and TL labelling schemes in assisting consumers to build a healthy daily diet. Participants must compose a daily diet, choosing from a finite set of products, and are paid a fixed cash amount only if the diet satisfies pre-determined nutritional goals. Goals correspond to the guideline daily amount values for different nutritional attributes, whose number varies from 1 (kcal) to 7 (kcal, fat, sugar, salt, fibre, vitamin C and calcium). Three different labels, GDA, TL and a combined GDATL are provided. Results show that GDA performs better than TL when subjects do not face time constraints. When time is limited however, TL and GDA have identical efficacy with 4 nutritional goals, and TL even outperforms GDA with 7 nutritional goals.

In a series of field experiments, we elicit risk preferences for financial, life-duration, and environmental domains using sequential multiple price-list auctions. We intentionally oversample subjects who frequently engage in activities that increase their mortality risk. We analyze the data using a bivariate Random Preference approach. Under the assumption that subjects are Rank Dependent Utility maximizers, we estimate the joint distribution of the CRRA and probability weighting coefficients. We find that the experienced risk takers are less likely than the student control group to overweight small probability, extreme events in their decision making. This is true in all three domains. We find that the tendency of women to be more risk averse in the financial domain than men arises from probability weighting rather than differences in the utility function. Finally, we show that a significant minority of subjects deviate from the type of s-inverse probability weighting typically observed in experiments.

published

We designed a commitment savings product for a Philippine bank and implemented it using a randomized control methodology. The savings product was intended for individuals who want to commit now to restrict access to their savings, and who were sophisticated enough to engage in such a mechanism. We conducted a baseline survey on 1777 existing or former clients of a bank. One month later, we offered the commitment product to a randomly chosen subset of 710 clients; 202 (28.4 percent) accepted the offer and opened the account. In the baseline survey, we asked hypothetical time discounting questions. Women who exhibited a lower discount rate for future relative to current trade-offs, and hence potentially have a preference for commitment, were indeed significantly more likely to open the commitment savings account. After twelve months, average savings balances increased by 81 percentage points for those clients assigned to the treatment group relative to those assigned to the control group. We conclude that the savings response represents a lasting change in savings, and not merely a short-term response to a new product.

Although (or because) it is uncommon to observe consumers bargaining at retail stores in the Western world, the circumstances under which retail rms are actually willing to bargain is largely unknown. We construct a theoretical model in order to better understand how price and rm characteristics in uence a rm's incentives to bargain and test the model's predictions by conducting a eld experiment at nearly 300 stores throughout Vienna, Austria. In particular, we analyze the extent to which retail rms throughout Vienna consent to granting a discount when asked. A discount was granted approximately 40% of the time, and the average positive discount was approximately 10% o of a product's posted price. We relate rms' willingness to bargain to price and rm characteristics, in line with our theory.

In this study, we try to assess the prevalence of illicit downloading in the market of audio books and the willingness to admit to such practices. We compare the Bayesian Truth Serum (Prelec, 2004) treatment in which truthful responses and precise estimates are rewarded to the control treatment with a flat participation fee. We find a sizable treatment effect – incentivized ‘pirates’ admit approximately 60% more often than the nonincentivized ones.

We report the results of an experimental study analyzing the effects of Internet piracy on book sales. We conducted a year-long controlled large-scale field experiment with pre-treatment pair matching. Half of the book titles received experimental treatment, in which a specialized agency would immediately remove any unauthorized copy appearing on the Internet. For the other half we merely registered such occurrences, but no countermeasures were taken. For all the titles we obtained print and e-book sales statistics from the publishers. We find that removal of unauthorized copies was an effective method of curbing piracy, but this had no bearing on legal sales.

Information programs that leverage peer comparisons are used to encourage pro-social behavior in many contexts. We document how imperfect information generates heterogenous responses to treatments involving personalized feedback and peer comparisons. In our field experiment in retail electricity, we find that most households either overestimate or underestimate their relative energy consumption pre-treatment. Households that overestimated respond to new information by temporarily increasing electricity consumption, whereas households that underestimated take steps that lead to long term energy conservation. We explore the implications of these results for the external validity and design of information programs.

When asking for donations, charitable organizations often suggest a potential amount to contribute. However, the evidence concerning the effects of such suggestions is scarce and inconsistent. Unlike the majority of earlier studies concerned with small-money solicitations, we examine the effect of larger nonbinding suggestions in the context of middle-range donations which are relevant in practice. In a randomized field experiment conducted in conjunction with the Bavarian State Opera, opera visitors received solicitation letters asking to support a social youth project organized by the opera house. The three different treatments were: no suggestion and suggestions of €100 and €200, respectively. Both suggestions were larger than average and median donations in this context. We find that suggested contribution levels substantially influence the distribution of donations actually received. The mean amounts given increase significantly if a suggestion is made. The increase is stronger in the €200 treatment. On the other hand, the participation rate decreases if a suggestion is made. Overall, the returns from the campaign increase non-significantly when a suggestion is made. The solicitation was repeated a year later, without any suggestion. There is weak evidence that suggestions have a long-term effect on individual contribution-level decisions.

Over recent years, parking policy has become a key element of urban transport policy and planning in many countries. The need of urban mobility, mostly guaranteed by private cars, in facts, impacts on the policy and regulations of parking areas. The issue is particularly relevant for work related regular trips. Workers have an inelastic demand for parking spaces and limited alternatives to private transport. Often working places have a car parking area to satisfy workers needs but when this is not provided, it implicitly conditions workers' behaviours. The aim of this research is to analyse the trade-off between parking space availability and cost, in terms of time savings (considering time in terms of foregone earnings). This information is pivotal when designing parking policies in terms of fares, investments and regulation. The cost-opportunity of saving time, having information on the availability of slots closer to the working place, is conditioned by the worker's income and earnings. Since the pivotal work of Axhausen and Polak (1991), a relevant body of literature has focused on parking behaviour, measuring many different dimensions in terms of travellers' choice of parking type and location. However, the little attention has been devoted to understand how risk and uncertainty influence drivers' behaviours in parking decision. This paper presents two studies addressing this issue. Both aims to collect disaggregate data on travellers' responses to changes in parking attributes and related information. Different components of the parking activity (e.g., general in-vehicle time, parking search time, egress time) are controlled for, in relation to the characteristics of the respondent. In order to avoid heterogeneity in relation to journey purposes we focus on workers' mobility. The first study is carried out using a standard stated preference approach; the second is carried out in a laboratory through the set up of an experiment. The collected data is used to build simple model of consumer's choice related to parking decision, taking explicitly into consideration both risk and uncertainty. Laboratory's results are compared to the field-experiment's outcome in order to identify potential significant differences and, where possible, with existing revealed and stated preference results.

We examine the relationship between the price of giving and the decision to contribute in a framed field experiment (n = 2,440). In a departure from previous research using match rates and rebates, we vary the price of contributing to the public good directly. Treatment groups differ between subjects by the amount of money subjects have to give up in order to provide one unit of the public good. In contrast to earlier results, the theoretical prediction of a clear negative relationship between price and the decision whether to contribute is borne out by the experimental evidence. We estimate the mean elasticity of the probability to contribute as -0.31. The direct price effect is robust across specifications including sociodemographic controls for the highly heterogenous, Internet-representative non-student sample of subjects.

Many studies suggest that daily income earners behave as if they have daily income targets. Less work has examined the determinants of the targets themselves. Using data on labor supply, shocks, and self-reported cash needs from 257 bicycle taxi drivers in Western Kenya, we provide evidence that many individuals treat their daily cash need as the day's target. We conjecture that in a physically demanding job, workers may have an incentive to quit early and so set a personal rule of "earning enough for the day's need" as an internal commitment device to provide effort. This heuristic is more common among less educated workers and has substantial welfare costs: greater variance in hours worked is associated with worse health, and we estimate that workers would earn 5% more by working a set number of hours each day (more if their wage elasticity were positive).

This study measures risk and loss aversion using Prospect Theory and the impact of emotions on those parameters. Our controlled experiment at two universities in Mexico City, using uncompensated students as research subjects, found results similar to those obtained by Tanaka et al. (2010). In order to study the role of emotions, we provided subjects with randomly varied information on rising deaths due to drug violence in Mexico and also on youth unemployment. In agreement with previous studies, we find that risk aversion on the gains domain decreases with age and income. We also find that loss aversion decreases with income and is less for students in public universities. With regard to emotions, risk aversion increases with sadness and loss aversion is negatively influenced by anger. On the loss domain, anger dominates sadness. On average, anger reduces loss aversion by half.

This study employs a vignette experiment to inquire, which features of online “piracy” make it ethically discernible from a traditional theft. This question is pertinent since the social norm concerning traditional theft is starkly different from the evidence on ethical evaluation of online “piracy”. We specifically distinguish between contextual features of theft, such as for example the physical loss of an item, breach of protection, availability of alternatives, emotional proximity to the victim of theft, etc. We find that some of these dimensions have more weight in ethical judgment, but there are no clear differences between online and traditional theft which could explain discrepancy in the frequency of commitment.

The endowment effect, the tendency to value possessions more than non-possessions, is a well-known departure from rational choice and has been replicated in numerous settings. We investigate the universality of the endowment effect, its evolutionary signi�耀 cance, and its dependence on environmental factors. We experimentally test for the endowment effect in an isolated and evolutionarily relevant population of hunter-gatherers, the Hadza Bushmen of Northern Tanzania. We �耀 nd that Hadza living in isolated regions do not display the endowment effect, while Hadza living in a geographic region with increased exposure to modern society and markets do display the endowment effect. (JEL C93, D12, O15) This paper uses a natural experiment in a hunter-gatherer population to provide evidence on three questions: the universality of a behavioral bias (the endowment effect), its dependence on cultural factors, and its evolutionary signi�耀 cance. Systematic deviations from rational behavior have been extensively documented, along with their importance for market outcomes. Yet, evidence on the three questions above is sparse, especially for biases in economic decisions. First, most experiments are conducted in industrialized societies, and in particular on college campuses, so biases could be the result of shared experiences as opposed to innate features of human behavior. Second, cross-cultural experiments typically compare very different groups, making it hard to attribute differences in behavior to a speci�耀 c cultural factor due to omitted variable bias (Roth et al. 1991; Henrich et al. 2001, 2006). Third, while many contributions in economics have proposed evolutionary

In January 1999, Hugo Chavez was sworn like the president of the Republic of Venezuela. In the late 1999 was approved the Bolivarian Constitution and was the beginning of the V Republic. Currently, after 14 years, Venezuela is governed by his politic party. This article starts a research work to know about the Venezuelan’s preferences of consumption as well as the possible causes that diminishes his saving and how distributes his income. The paper shows a descriptive analysis of the variables researched, was made a survey to obtain data about preferences and distribution of the income. It was used a non-probabilistic modal and intentional sample. The survey is a pilot and the final results will be shown in a future article. Finally, the main conclusion of this paper is that inflation ad scarce goods could be, currently, the most important determinants of consumption and depressants of saving in Venezuela.

Empirical evidence on peer intermediation lags behind many years of lending practice and a large body of theory in which lenders use peers to mitigate adverse selection and moral hazard. Using a simple referral incentive mechanism under individual liability, we develop and implement a two-stage field experiment that permits separate identification of peer screening and enforcement effects. We allow for borrower heterogeneity in both ex-ante repayment type and ex-post susceptibility to social pressure. Our key contribution is how we deal with the interaction between these two sources of asymmetric information. Our method allows us to cleanly identify selection on the likelihood of repayment, selection on the susceptibility to social pressure, and loan enforcement. We estimate peer effects on loan repayment in our setting, and find no evidence of screening (albeit with an imprecisely estimated zero) and large effects on enforcement. We then discuss the potential utility and portability of the methodological innovation, for both science and for practice.

Today more than 2.7 billion people rely on biomass as their primary cooking fuel, with profound implications for the environment and people’s well-being. Wood provision is often time-consuming and the emitted smoke has severe health effects – both burdens that afflict women in particular. The dissemination of Improved Cooking Stoves (ICS) is frequently considered an eff ective remedy for these problems. This paper evaluates the take-up of ICS and their impacts through a randomized controlled trial in rural Senegal. Although distributed for free, the ICS are used by almost 100 % of households. Furthermore, we find substantial effects on firewood consumption, eye infections, and respiratory disease symptoms. These findings substantiate the increasing efforts of the international community to improve access to improved cooking stoves and call for a more direct promotion of these stoves.

We examine a randomized trial that allows separate identification of peer screening and enforcement of credit contracts. A South African microlender offered half its clients a bonus for referring a friend who repaid a loan. For the remaining clients, the bonus was conditional on loan approval. After approval, the repayment incentive was removed from half the referrers in the first group and added for half those in the second. We find large enforcement effects, a $12 (100 Rand) incentive reduced default by 10 percentage points from a base of 20%. In contrast, we find no evidence of screening.

This paper reports results of an evaluation experiment designed to provide both hedonic scores and measurements of consumer willingness to pay (WTP), on the basis of visual inspection, tasting, and presentation of information on origin, ingredients, and production processes of typical kinds of Italian salami with pig blood as their principal component. The information on the production methods and ingredients seemed to interact negatively with the sensorial perception of the product after tasting, probably because of the presence of blood and other problematic components among the ingredients.

This paper presents the results of a field experiment in which a sample of older workers was randomized between a treatment group that was given information about key Social Security provisions and a control group that was not. The experiment was designed to examine whether it is possible to affect individual behavior using a relatively inexpensive informational intervention about the provisions of a public program and to explore the mechanisms underlying the behavior change. We find that our relatively mild intervention (sending an informational brochure and an invitation to a web-tutorial) increased labor force participation one year later by 4 percentage points relative to the control group mean of 74 percent and that this effect is driven by a 7.2 percentage point increase among female subjects. In addition to affecting actual labor supply behavior, the information intervention increased survey measures of the perceived returns to working longer, especially among female respondents.

To select one of several products (or to buy nothing) is a daily decision. Its foundations vary from one person to another and are based on perceptions, preferences, and other criteria. The standard theoretical perspective conveys that people choose options with the highest net benefit. However, the zero price model, proposed by Shampanier, Mazar, and Ariely (SMA) (2007), suggests that decisions about free (zero price) products do not simply subtract costs from benefits but instead perceive other gains and costs associated with free products. This paper tests this second alternative by contrasting demand for telecommunication products in Morocco, mainly SMS and calls. The price difference is maintained between the cheaper and expensive options such that the cheaper product is priced at either a low positive price (cost condition) or zero price (free condition). The results suggest that more participants choose the cheaper option, whereas fewer participants choose the more expensive one. People act as if zero pricing is a special price, as suggested by the zero price model. The paper tests also the affect as an explanation to the zero price effect. The result suggests that the price effect cannot be fully attributed to this dimension.

We examine how physical abilities affect individuals' preferences. In particular, by incorporating social comparison into prospect theory, we directly estimate the degree of loss aversion from social comparison, a concept we term `ALJ' (\textit{Avoiding Loss relative to the Joneses}). Our main findings are as follows: (i) the participants who choose the physical education as the best subject exhibit a greater degree of ALJ than others; (ii) physical fitness influences the degree of ALJ; (iii) gender influences social comparison preferences; (iv) participants with a greater degree of ALJ do not respond to voluntary questionnaire; (v) the form of participants' ALJ is affected by the voluntary behavior of their parents. A comparison of ALJ with loss aversion in the original prospect theory reveals that they have different characteristics.

This paper assesses whether and to what extent Flemish households are willing to pay for electricity generated with renewable resources. Via a choice experiment, households were offered the choice between as set of green electricity contracts, characterised by the renewables share in electricity supplied to their dwelling, the renewable generation technology (wind, biomass, PV...) and its impact on the electricity bill. A main effects conditional logit model and a main effects random parameter logit model are estimated. The estimation results show that households prefer ‘green contacts’, but renewables technologies are valued differently. The estimates are then used to assess the marginal willingness to pay by Flemish households for each of the contract attributes. From a policy perspective, the results suggest that a not too small proportion of Flemish households would be willing to switch to another power supply contract if that can be done at limited cost. Moreover, the results suggest that it would not be a good idea to focus on the deployment of one or only a few technologies. Policies resulting in a diversified portfolio of technologies are positively valued by households and will obtain broader support.

We examine inconsistencies in preference orderings of the “more is less” kind (Alevy et al. 2011) using the Contingent valuation (CV) and the Inferred valuation (IV) method (Lusk and Norwood 2009a, 2009b). We find that when moving in a familiar market for consumers (i.e., the food market) we only observe weak effects of inconsistencies. In addition, we find that the IV method is no better than the CV method in generating more consistent preference orderings. Surprisingly, we also find that the IV method generates higher valuations than CV, rendering one of its advantages of mitigating social desirability bias questionable.

Revealed preference theory offers a criterion for decision-making quality: if decisions are high quality then there exists a utility function that the choices maximize. We conduct a large-scale field experiment that enables us to test subjects' choices for consistency with utility maximization and to combine the experimental data with a wide range of individual socioeconomic information for the subjects. There is considerable heterogeneity in subjects' consistency scores: high-income and high-education subjects display greater levels of consistency than low-income and low-education subjects, men are more consistent than women, and young subjects are more consistent than older subjects. We also find that consistency with utility maximization is strongly related to wealth: a standard deviation increase in the consistency score is associated with 15-19 percent more wealth. This result conditions on socioeconomic variables including current income, education, and family structure, and is little changed when we add controls for past income, risk tolerance and the results of a standard personality test used by psychologists.

In a laboratory experiment, we study consumer responses to 7 Nutrition ‘Front of Pack’ Logos. In addition to the Guideline Daily Amounts (GDA) logo, the six other logos vary according to three criteria: (i) Granularity (What object do we rate? Product vs. Nutrient), (ii) Reference Set (How do we distinguish between products? All Products vs. Product Family), and (iii) Policy Range (Do we include bad ratings? Green vs. Green and Red). 364 subjects, all parents accustomed to shopping, were asked to fill their shopping cart for their family for the next couple of days in an e-shopping environment. To do so, they could choose among 273 products grouped into 35 product families. They were then given the opportunity to revise their shopping cart after one of the seven logos had been exhaustively applied to all 273 products. The nutritional quality of a cart was assessed according to its salt, free sugar and saturated fatty acids content. We found that all of the seven logos significantly improved the nutritional quality of the shopping carts. On average, rating the product rather than the nutrient was more efficient. Informing on both healthy and unhealthy products was also more efficient on average but had significant toxic effects. The GDA logo lies at the median of our logo chart list. Unlike free sugar and saturated fatty acids, salt appears to be a particular case, as our logos proved to be insufficient for reducing its consumption.

The security of natural gas supply is an important issue for all EU countries due to the regionâ€Ââ„¢s heavy dependence on imported supply sources and in light of energy demand for gas that is continuously increasing. Discussions have emphasised strategies for securing the supply at the macro level, e.g. diversification in supply sources, increase in storage capacity, etc. By contrast, consumersâ€Ââ„¢ demand for the reliability of gas supply is rarely investigated. Hence this study was conducted to examine the economic implications associated with the security of gas supply directly to domestic consumers. Based on the choice experiment approach, household surveys were conducted in France, Italy and the UK. The results confirmed that the degree of the economic impact of a disruption of gas supply to domestic consumers was a function of the duration of a supply disruption and the season in which a supply cut would take place, as well as other preferences of consumers. The willingness to pay to secure per unit of gas consumption, or alternatively the costs of gas unsupplied, was estimated at between €2.65/cubic metre and €41.48/cubic metre across three different European countries.

Revealed preference theory o¤ers a criterion for decision-making quality: if decisions are high quality then there exists a utility function that the choices maximize. We conduct a large-scale ?eld experiment that enables us to test subjects?choices for consistency with utility maximization and to combine the experimental data with a wide range of individual socioeco-nomic information for the subjects. There is considerable heterogeneity in subjects?consistency scores: high-income and high-education subjects display greater levels of consistency than low- income and low-education subjects, men are more consistent than women, and young subjects are more consistent than older subjects. We also ?nd that consistency with utility maximization is strongly related to wealth: a standard deviation increase in the consistency score is associated with 15-19 percent more wealth. This result conditions on socioeconomic variables including current income, education, and family structure, and is little changed when we add controls for past income, risk tolerance and the results of a standard personality test used by psychologists.

2011-05; Objective: To compare the impact of food price policies on the nutritional quality of food baskets chosen by low-income and medium-income women. Methods: Experimental economics was used to simulate a fruit and vegetable price subsidy (FV policy) and a mixed policy subsidizing healthy products and taxing unhealthy ones(NP policy)Low-income (n=95) and medium–income (n=33) women selected a daily food basket at current prices and then at policy prices. Energy density (ED) and the mean adequacy ratio (MAR) were used as nutritional quality indicators. Results: At baseline, low-income women selected less healthy baskets than medium–income ones (less fruit and vegetables, more unhealthy products,higher ED, lower MAR). Both policies improved nutritional quality (fruit and vegetable quantities increased, ED decreased,the MAR increased), but the magnitude of the improvement was often lower among low income women. For instance, their ED decreased by 5.3% with the FV policy and by 7.3% with the NP policy, whereas decreases of 13.2% and 12.6% respectively were recorded for the medium–income group.

Noting that the use of Internet is not only utilitarian but experiential indeed cultural, this dissertation describes in depth and explains what people lives in their online consumer experiences. This description is done through the three great social and personal changes brought by the advent of cyberculture: the question of materiality of the body during immersion, through the concept of telepresence, the identity strategies and new forms of sociability appearing in the online consumption. The research is interpretive and involves a number of methods including the life stories as the main one (the semi-structured interviews and projective collages are also used). They are analyzed by a structural analysis and comparative analysis. In addition, the dissertation engages multidisciplinary literature, mainly based on media research, social psychology and marketing. Finally, recommendations are made for researchers and managers.