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This paper explores generosity among anonymous villagers and sharing within families using a dictator game field experiment that was carried out in rural villages in Ethiopia. We find that generosity among anonymous villagers is very low compared with the findings in the dictator game literature. On average, the dictators in our sample allocate only 6% of their endowments to anonymous persons in the village, and three-fourths of the dictators keep all of their endowments to themselves when paired with anonymous persons. However, we found very high levels of sharing between husband and wife. In terms of gender differences, we find that women are not more generous towards anonymous persons, nor are they more likely to share within their families. In fact, there is some evidence, albeit weak, showing that women allocate less to anonymous persons than do men. Additionally, there is strong evidence that women are less likely to share their resources with their spouse than are men.

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 seed noisy information to members of a real-world social network to study how information diffusion and information aggregation jointly shape social learning. Our environment features substantial social learning. We show that learning occurs via diffusion which is highly imperfect: signals travel only up to two steps in the conversation network and indirect signals are transmitted noisily. We then compare two theories of information aggregation: a naive model in which people double-count signals that reach them through multiple paths, and a sophisticated model in which people avoid double-counting by tagging the source of information. We show that to distinguish between these models of aggregation, it is critical to explicitly account for imperfect diffusion. When we do so, we find that our data are most consistent with the sophisticated tagged model.

This natural field experiment tests the effects of purely symbolic awards on volunteer retention in a public goods context. The experiment is conducted at Wikipedia, which faces declining editor retention rates, particularly among newcomers. Randomization assures that award receipt is orthogonal to previous performance. The analysis reveals that awards have a sizeable effect on newcomer retention, which persists over the four quarters following the initial intervention. This is noteworthy for indicating that awards for volunteers can be effective even if they have no impact on the volunteers' future career opportunities. The awards are purely symbolic, and the status increment they produce is limited to the recipients' pseudonymous online identities in a community they have just recently joined. The results can be explained by enhanced self-identification with the community, but they are also in line with recent findings on the role of status and reputation, recognition, and evaluation potential in online communities.

“Si el lo necesita” (if he really needs it) was the most common argument given by the subjects who accepted the zero offer in the ultimatum game (strategy method) during experiments conducted among illiterate (adult) gypsies in Vallecas, Madrid. Interestingly the acceptance of the zero offer was not a rare case but, in contrast, was the modal value. This is even more remarkable if we consider that the 97% of the subjects proposed the equal split.

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.

This study develops theory and uses a door-to-door fundraising field experiment to explore the economics of charity. We approached nearly 5000 households, randomly divided into four experimental treatments, to shed light on key issues on the demand side of charitable fundraising. Empirical results are in line with our theory: in gross terms, our lottery treatments raised considerably more money than our voluntary contributions treatments. Interestingly, we find that a one standard deviation increase in female solicitor physical attractiveness is similar to that of the lottery incentive¡ªthe magnitude of the estimated difference in gifts is roughly equivalent to the treatment effect of moving from our theoretically most attractive approach (lotteries) to our least attractive approach (voluntary contributions).

The role of the market in mitigating and mediating various forms of behavior is perhaps the central issue facing behavioral economics today. This study designs a field experiment that is explicitly linked to a controlled laboratory experiment to examine whether, and to what extent, social preferences influence outcomes in actual market transactions. While agents drawn from a well-functioning marketplace behave in accord with social preference models in tightly controlled laboratory experiments, when they are observed in their naturally occurring settings, their behavior approaches what is predicted by self-interest theory. In the limit, much of the observed behavior in the marketplace that is consistent with social preferences is due to reputational concerns: suppliers who expect to have future interactions with buyers provide higher product quality only when the buyer can verify quality via a third-party certifier. The data also speak to theories of how reputation effects enhance market performance. In particular, reputation and the monitoring of quality are found to be complements, and findings suggest that the private market can solve the lemons problem through third-party verification.

Drawing on Gneezy and Rustichini [Q.J. Econ. 115 (2000) 791], we show that cognitive abilities seem at least twice as important as financial incentives. This result backs up the exhortation of Camerer and Hogarth [J. Risk Uncertain. 19 (1999) 7] to pay attention to both the labor and capital aspects of cognitive production in experiments.

Political stock markets (PSM) are sometimes seen as substitutes for opinion polls. On the bases of a behavioural model, specific preconditions were drawn out under which manipulation in PSM can weaken this argument. Evidence for manipulation is reported from the data of two separate PSM during the Berlin 1999 state elections.

Using experimental data of children and their mothers, this paper explores the intergenerational relationship of impatience. The child’s impatience stems from a delay of gratification experiment. Mother’s impatience has been assessed by a choice task where the mothers faced trade-offs between a smaller-sooner and a larger-later monetary reward with a delay of six or twelve months. The findings demonstrate an intergenerational relationship in short-run decision making. Controlling for mother’s and child’s characteristics the child’s impatience at preschool age is significantly correlated with the six month maternal reservation interest rate.

To explore the effects of daylights saving time (DST) transition on cognitive performance and risk-taking behaviour immediately before and one week after the shift to DST, this study examines two Australian populations living in similar geographic surroundings who experience either no DST transition (Queensland) or a one-hour DST desynchronization (New South Wales). This exogenous variation creates natural control (QLD) and treatment (NSW) groups that enable isolation and identification of the DST transition’s effect on the two outcome variables. Proximity to the border ensures similar socio-demographic and socio-economic conditions and thus permits comparison of the cognitive performance and risk-taking behaviour of affected versus unaffected individuals. The results suggest that exposure to the DST transition has no significant impact on either cognitive performance or risk-taking behaviour.

(english) This last decade has seen the emergence of a new field of research in development economics: randomised control trials. This paper explores the contrast between the (many) limitations and (very narrow) real scope of these methods and their success in sheer number and media coverage. Our analysis suggests that the paradox is due to a particular economic and political mix driven by the innovative strategies used by this new school’s researchers and by specific interests and preferences in the academic world and the donor community. _________________________________ (français) La dernière décennie a vu l'émergence d'un nouveau champ de recherche en économie du développement : les méthodes expérimentales d'évaluation d'impacts par assignation aléatoire. Cet article explore le contraste entre d’une part les limites (nombreuses) et la circonscription (très étroite) du champ réel d'application de ces méthodes et d’autre part leur succès, attesté à la fois par leur nombre et leur forte médiatisation. L’analyse suggère que ce contraste est le fruit d’une conjonction économique et politique particulière, émanant de stratégies novatrices de la part des chercheurs de cette nouvelle école, et d’intérêts et de préférences spécifiques provenant à la fois du monde académique et de la communauté des donateurs.

The paper analyzes a new Honduran conditional cash transfer experiment (Bono 10,000) in which 150 poor villages (of 300) were treated. The transfers were much larger in size than an earlier experiment (Galiani & McEwan, 2013), but yielded smaller full-sample effects on school enrollment, child labor participation, and measures of health service use. One explanation is that Bono 10,000 did not apply conditions to children: only one child in eligible households was subject to the education condition, and young children and mothers were only subject to health conditions in the absence of older children. Consistent with this, we find a large effect on enrollment (and a nearly off-setting one on child labor) among only children, and smaller and insignificant effects on children in larger households. We only find significant effects on health service use among children and mothers in the absence of older children (despite a much smaller household transfer). The heterogeneity does not appear to be driven by correlated variables such as household size, child age, or poverty.

We report results from the impact evaluation of a randomized educational intervention targeted at elementary school children. The program uses case studies, stories and classroom activities to improve the ability to imagine future selves, and emphasizes forward-looking behavior. We find that treated students make more patient intertemporal choices in incentivized experimental tasks. The effect is stronger for students who are identified as present-biased in the baseline. Furthermore, using official administrative records, we find that treated children are significantly less likely to receive a low "behavioral grade". These results are persistent one year after the intervention, replicate well in a different sample, and are robust across different experimental elicitation methods.

Waiting and transferring in transit travel are often perceived negatively and can be significant obstacles to mode shifts between automobile to transit. High-amenity stations, transit centers served by multiple routes and multimodal hubs are becoming increasingly popular as strategies for mitigating transit users' aversion to waiting and transferring. However, beyond recent evidence that realtime departure information reduces perceived waiting time, there is limited empirical evidence as to which other specific station and stop amenities can effectively influence user perceptions of waiting time. To address this knowledge gap, the authors conducted a passenger survey and video-recorded waiting passengers at different types of transit stops and stations to investigate the impacts of various station characteristics on transit users' perceptions of waiting and transferring time, controlling for weather and time of day. The authors employ regression analysis to explain the variation in riders' waiting time estimates as a function of their objectively observed waiting times, as well as station and stop amenities, while controlling for weather, time of day, self-reported and observed socio-demographic characteristics and trip characteristics. Based on the results, waits at stops with no amenities are perceived as twice as long or longer than they actually are. Benches, shelters and realtime departure information signs significantly reduce perceived waiting times. A complete package of all three nearly erases the time perception penalty of waiting. Women waiting in surroundings perceived to be insecure report waits as dramatically longer than they really are, and longer than do men and/or respondents in surroundings perceived to be secure. However, the provision of stop amenities significantly reduces this disparity. The authors recommend a focus on providing basic stop amenities as broadly as possible, continued exploration of methods for communicating arrival information and a particular focus on stops in less safe areas for improvements.

In this experiment, we investigate determinants of the individual demand for voluntary climate change mitigation. Subjects decide between a cash prize and an allowance from the EU Emissions Trading Scheme for one ton of CO2 that will be deleted afterwards. We vary the incentives of the decision situation in which we distinguish between real monetary incentives and a hypothetical decision situation with and without a cheap talk script. Furthermore, decisions were implemented either as purely individual or as a collective action using majority voting. We observe a significant hypothetical bias in the demand for voluntary climate change mitigation. In case of the individual decision situation this bias is caused solely by subjects with low income. Collective decision making affects demand positively in the hypothetical decision situation only.

We investigate the effect of spells of no formal employment of young Germans on their chances of entering the labor market. We also study whether the potential negative effects of such spells can be mitigated by publicly provided training measures. In a field experiment, fictitious applications were sent to firms advertising an apprenticeship position for office manager. Our results show that applicants who have been out of school for two years are not less likely to be invited compared to applicants who apply during their last year of schooling. Among the two applicant types who have been out of school for two years, applicants who have taken part in a training course are significantly more likely to pass the first step in the recruitment process than those without supplementary schooling. Our findings can be explained with signaling and human capital theory while there is no evidence of stigma effects.

We conduct an experimental study among European citizens regarding cross-cultural perceptions related to trust in two dimensions: volunteerism and honesty. We use representative samples from five major economies of the Euro area: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain. We find that European citizens rely on nationality to infer behavior. Assessments of behavior show a north/south pattern in which participants from northern countries are perceived to be more honest and to provide more effort in a volunteering game than are participants from southern countries. Actual behavior is, however, not always in line with these assessments. Assessments of honesty show strong evidence of social projection: Participants expect other European citizens to be less honest if they are culturally closer to themselves. Assessments of volunteerism instead show a similar north/south-pattern in which both northern and southern Europeans expect higher performance of northerners than they do of southerners.

We investigate whether risk, time, environmental, and social preferences affect single family homeowners’ investments in energy efficient renovations and energy quality of their house using established experimental measures and questionnaires. We find that homeowners who report to be more risk taking are more likely to have renovated their house. Pro-environmental and futureoriented renovators, i.e. renovators with lower discount factors, live in homes with higher energy efficiency. Controlling for the energy efficiency of houses, we further find that energy consumption as measured by heating and energy costs are lower for future-oriented and proenvironmental individuals. Social preferences measured in a dictator and a generosity game play a mixed role for investments in energy efficiency and energy consumption. published

We study the role of village-level religious fragmentation on intra- and inter-group cooperation in India. We report on data on two-player Prisoners’ Dilemma and Stag Hunt experiments played by 516 Hindu and Muslim participants in rural India. Our treatments are the identity of the two players and the degree of village-level religious heterogeneity. In religiously-heterogeneous villages, cooperation rates in the Prisoners’ Dilemma are higher when subjects play with another in-group member for both Hindus and Muslims, but to a much lesser extent in the Stag Hunt game. This suggests that positive in-group biases operate primarily on the willingness to achieve socially efficient outcomes, rather than through beliefs about the actions by one's counterpart. Interestingly, cooperation rates among people of the same religion are significantly lower in homogeneous villages than in fragmented villages in both games. This is likely because a sense of group identity is only meaningful in the presence of an out-group. This, together with little evidence for out-group prejudice in either game, means religious diversity is beneficial.

In this paper, I experimentally examine the employment opportunities of Austrians with and without migration background. Applications of candidates with a Serbian, Turkish, Chinese, Nigerian and no migration background are sent in response to job openings. Previous experiments have indicated ethnicity via the name of an applicant, however employers may not always correctly perceive this signal. Since photographs are a requirement for applications in the German speaking context, this study uses a novel approach to signal ethnic background and employs carefully matched photos as distinct visual cues. While results document employment discrimination for all groups with migration background, it is most pronounced for applicants with an African, i.e. Nigerian, background. To explain why and when discrimination occurs, a battery of firm and job specific characteristics are examined (e.g. whether team or customer contact is part of the job description). However, these help little to explain the actual level of discrimination. Discrimination in Austria therefore seems to be a general phenomenon driven by employers’ preferences that is barely affected by situational variables.

The extent to which individuals discount the future and whether they discount in a time-consistent fashion is an important determinant of their life outcomes. Using a field experiment in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we show that direct exposure to violence substantially increases present bias – choice of the smaller, immediate reward over the larger, later reward. We demonstrate that providing individuals with a delay between information about the choice and the choice itself mitigates the differences in behavior between those who were exposed to violence and those who were not. Our findings suggest that enforcing a cooling off period between income notification and consumption opportunities may help generate more patient choices and mitigate the elevated impulsivity of individuals that have experienced violence. We measure our treatment effects both in reduced-form as well as in the form of structural estimates of a quasi-hyperbolic discounting function to enable comparison with measures of other types of time inconsistency and a welfare evaluation of the treatment effect. Our results have implications for policies aimed at alleviating the deleterious effects of present bias and the role of deliberation in the structure of commitment contracts.

We present experimental evidence from a bilingual city in Northern Italy on whether the affiliation to a specific language group affects behavior in a prisoner's dilemma game and leads to discrimination. Running a framed field experiment with 828 six- to eleven-year old primary school children in the city of Meran, we find that cooperation generally increases with age, but that the gap between cooperation among in-group members and cooperation towards children speaking another language is considerable and develops with age. This gap is due to both in-group favoritism and language group discrimination. While the former is persistent across all age groups and both language groups and accounts for most of the discrimination observed, the latter only emerges in later years of primary school among children belonging to the German language group. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

We conducted large-scale lost letter experiments in Beijing, a megacity with more than 21 million residents, to test if the observed altruistic attribute of the letter recipient would induce more passersby to return the lost letters. The treatment letters were addressed to a nationally renowned charitable organization in China, while the control letters were intended to an invented individual. A total of 832 ready-to-be-posted letters were distributed in 208 communities across eight districts in the city. The overall return rate was only about 13%. Yet, the return rate of the treatment letters (17%) was nearly twice as high as that of the control letters (9%). The finding adds large-scale field experiment evidence in support of the interdependent other-regarding preferences theory. In addition, we also found that the lost letters were more likely to be returned if they were dropped in communities with a relatively higher income or a postal box located closer.

There has been little systematic study of the mechanisms typically used to raise money for charity. One of the most common is the simple raffle in which participants purchase chances to win a prize at a constant price. We conduct a field experiment randomly assigning participants to four raffle treatments to examine the effectiveness of alternative incentive schemes designed to encourage either participation or volume. Our results confirm the importance of incentives in that we find revenue gains are available on both margins. Our experiment, and others like it, illustrates the power of field experiments to inform fundraising choices.

This study experimentally investigates gender quotas in light of peer review. We investigate competitions with and without gender quotas and a peer review process that allows for sabotage. Our findings show that the possibility of peer sabotage renders the gender quota ineffective in encouraging women to enter tournaments. Moreover, we provide evidence of a severe backlash against women, as they become targets of sabotage under gender quotas. Interestingly, this is the result of women focusing on sabotaging each other while men sabotage indiscriminately. Our results have implications for the use of quotas to mitigate the underrepresentation and underperformance of minority groups in environments in which peer sabotage is possible. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2772 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.

Development economists have considered physical infrastructure to be a precondition for industrialization and economic development. Yet, two issues remain to be addressed in the literature. First, while proper identification of the causal effectiveness of infrastructure in reducing poverty is important, experimental evaluation, such as randomized control trials (RCT)-based evaluation, is difficult in the context of large-scale infrastructure. Second, while micro studies so far have focused on the nexus between infrastructure and certain types of poverty outcomes such as income, poverty, health, education, and other individual socio-economic outcomes, to better interpret a wide variety of micro-level infrastructure evaluation results using either experimental or non-experimental methods, the role of infrastructure should be placed in a broader context. To bridge these gaps, we augment the existing review articles on the same topic, such as Estache (2010), Hansen, Andersen, and White, (2012), and World Bank (2012) by addressing these two remaining issues. First, while forming a counterfactual is often difficult for impact evaluation of infrastructure, engineering constraints beyond human manipulation can allow people to adopt quasi-experimental methods of impact evaluation. Second, evaluators can adopt, for example, a hybrid method of natural and artefactual field experiments to elicit the role of infrastructure in facilitating the complementarity of the market, state, and community mechanisms.

An emerging theoretical literature focused on the incentive compatibility of stated preference surveys offers a new lens through which to view extant evidence on external validity, and provides guidance for practitioners. However, critical theoretical assumptions rest on latent respondent beliefs, such as the belief that respondents view surveys as potentially influencing policy (i.e., policy consequentiality), which gives rise to pressing empirical challenges. In this study, we develop a Hybrid Mixed Logit model capable of integrating multiple latent beliefs, and subjective measures of these beliefs, into discrete choice models of stated preferences. Further, we provide a split-sample test of the effects of exogenous information signals related to policy consequentiality. Our results suggest some potential for researchers to induce desired beliefs through simple information signals and, importantly, that latent beliefs and information signals significantly influence elicited willingness to pay.

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.

We introduce a simple, easy to implement instrument for jointly eliciting risk and ambiguity attitudes. Using this instrument, we structurally estimate a two-parameter model of preferences. Our findings indicate that ambiguity aversion is significantly overstated when risk neutrality is assumed. This highlights the interplay between risk and ambiguity attitudes as well as the importance of joint estimation. In addition, over our stakes levels we find no difference in the estimated parameters when incentives are real or hypothetical, raising the possibility that a simple hypothetical question can provide insights into an individuals preferences over ambiguity in such economic environments.

This paper examines the long-term impacts on health and healthy behaviors of two of the oldest and most widely cited U.S. early childhood interventions evaluated by the method of randomization with long-term follow- up: the Perry Preschool Project (PPP) and the Carolina Abecedarian Project (ABC). There are pronounced gender effects strongly favoring boys, although there are also effects for girls. Dynamic mediation analyses show a significant role played by improved childhood traits, above and beyond the effects of experimentally enhanced adult socioeconomic status. These results show the potential of early life interventions for promoting health.

Despite the widespread occurrence of humanitarian emergencies such as epidemics, earthquakes, droughts, floods and violent conflict and despite the significant financial resources devoted to humanitarian assistance, systematic learning from such interventions using rigorous theory-based impact evaluations is very rare. The objective of this paper is to examine the extent to which scientific impact evaluation methods can provide evidence to improve the effectiveness and efficiency in humanitarian action. This paper explores the methodological options and challenges associated with generating high quality evidence needed to answer key questions about the performance of humanitarian assistance, including whether assistance is reaching the right people, at the right time, is bringing about the desired changes in their lives (effectiveness) and is being delivered in the right doses, ways and with manageable costs (efficiency). With the help of six case studies and drawing on real-life examples from the small but growing academic literature, we demonstrate how impact evaluation methods can be used successfully and in an ethical manner to improve humanitarian assistance. A key lesson from our review is that it pays to be prepared. Much information is being collected these days about the risks of various emergencies unfolding, be they sudden onset or slow onset emergencies. Hence national actors and international donors can prepare for these events and for conducting meaningful impact evaluations. Given the overwhelming needs and the lack of funds, doing more with limited resources is a key challenge for humanitarian assistance and impact evaluation is one way of achieving this.

Internet is a very attractive technology for experiments implementation, both in order to reach more diverse and larger samples and as a field of economic research in its own right. This paper reports on an experiment performed both online and in the laboratory, designed so as to strengthen the internal validity of decisions elicited over the Internet. We use the same subject pool, the same monetary stakes and the same decision interface, and randomly assign two group of subjects between the Internet and a traditional University laboratory to compare behavior in a set of social preferences games. This comparison concludes in favor of the reliability of behaviors elicited through the Internet. Our behavioral results contradict the predictions of social distance theory, as we find that subjects allocated to the Internet treatment behave as if they were more altruistic, more trusting, more trustworthy and less risk averse than laboratory subjects. Those findings have practical importance for the growing community of researchers interested in using the Internet as a vehicle for social experiments and bear interesting methodological lessons for social scientists interested in using experiments to research the Internet as a field., L'internet constitue un terrain très attractif d'un point de vue expérimentale, à la fois comme moyen d'obtenir des échantillons plus larges et plus diversifiés, et comme champ de recherche à part entière en raison de son rôle croissant dans la sphère économique. Cet article traite d'une expérience réalisée à la fois par internet et en laboratoire, conçue pour renforcer la validité interne des décisions observées en ligne. Les deux traitements présentent la même base d'échantillonnage, les mêmes schémas de rémunération, et la même interface de décision. Nous avons cherché à comparer les comportements dans un ensemble de jeux de préférence sociale, les participants étant répartis de manière aléatoire entre jeu en ligne et jeu en laboratoire. Cette comparaison tend à confirmer la fiabilité des décisions observées en ligne. Nos résultats sont également contraires aux prédictions de la théorie de la distance sociale : les participants alloués au traitement par internet ont tendance à être plus altruistes, plus confiants et plus dignes de confiance, et enfin moins risquophobes que les joueurs en laboratoire.

In this project we sought to contribute to extant literature on overconfidence by identifying it in a large, heterogeneous sample making familiar, repeated choices in a natural environment which provides direct feedback. In Study 1 we elicited predictions of own finishing time among participants of the 2012 Warsaw Marathon. Their prediction errors turned out to be very highly correlated with the change in pace over the course of the run. In Study 2 we thus took this change in pace as a proxy for self-confidence and used existing field data of around one million participants. Both studies indicate that males as well as youngest and oldest participants tend to be more confident. In Study 2 we are also able to investigate national and cultural dimensions, confirming previously reported findings of relative overconfidence in Asians and providing some novel results, i.a. that relatively conservative societies tend to be more self-confident.

We test experimentally whether monitoring is less likely to reduce work motivation in distant than in close principal-agent relationships. Employing the same standard subject pool of students, we compare a laboratory and an internet implementation of an experimental principal-agent game where the principal can impose control at two different levels on the agent. Agency relationships are arguably more distant in the internet than in the laboratory setting. We find that differences in agents' effort due to an increase in the level of control are larger in the internet than in the laboratory experiment. The effect is driven by both higher intrinsic motivation and stronger control aversion in the laboratory. Agents' effort differences are fairly stable over time in both experiments which indicates that even experienced agents react more negatively to the implementation of control in the laboratory than on the internet. published

Reducing the burden of waiting in transit travel is critical to increase the attractiveness of public transportation and encourage people’s shift from automobile mode. Research shows that wait time perception is highly subjective and varies according to various factors such as mode, availability of schedule information or stops amenities. In addition, high-quality environments are known to reduce stress and to encourage walking and biking. Nevertheless, little research exists on the influence of the stops and stations surrounding environment on transit users’ wait time perception. This study aims to respond to this knowledge gap in order to optimize stop localization and micro urban design around stops. The study compares transit users’ actual and estimated wait time at 36 stops and stations offering a mix of environmental situations in the Twin Cities region. A regression analysis is used to explain the variation in riders’ waiting time estimates as a function of their objectively observed waiting times, as well as stop and station surrounding environment characteristics. The results show that, for waits longer than five minutes, the more the environment is polluted and exposed to traffic, the more transit users tend to overestimate their wait time and that, on the contrary, the more mature trees are present the shorter the wait time is perceived. The combination of the three variables indicates that after 5 minutes wait, the presence of trees achieves to compensate the effects of both air pollution and traffic awareness. Policy implications and further research needs are discussed.

We study tax compliance in Slovenia using data generated in a field experiment. Small accounting companies were randomly assigned to an untreated control group and two treatment groups. Companies in the first treatment group received a letter that highlighted the importance of paying taxes and informed about the likelihood of becoming subject to an audit. In the second treatment group, tax officers from the tax authorities handed out in person the same letter that companies in the first treatment group received by post. The results indicate that such letters can increase compliance, and trigger even more compliance if handed over in person. These findings are in line with the theoretical predictions that we derive to rationalize the experiment.

Acts of dishonesty permeate life. Understanding their origins, and what mechanisms help to attenuate such acts is an underexplored area of research. This study takes an economics approach to explore the propensity of individuals to act dishonestly across different economic environments. We begin by developing a simple model that highlights the channels through which one can increase or decrease dishonest acts. We lend empirical insights into this model by using an experiment that includes both parents and their young children as subjects. We find that the highest level of dishonesty occurs in settings where the parent acts alone and the dishonest act benefits the child rather than the parent. In this spirit, there is also an interesting effect of children on parents’ behavior: in the child’s presence, parents act more honestly, but there are gender differences. Parents act more dishonestly in front of sons than daughters. This finding has the potential of shedding light on the origins of the widely documented gender differences in cheating behavior observed among adults.

This article compares the use of risk-increasing and risk-reducing production inputs with the experimentally measured risk attitudes of farmers. For this purpose, the Just-Pope production function indicates production inputs' influence on output risk and a Holt-Laury lottery is used to measure the producer´s risk attitude. We test whether more risk averse farmers use more risk-reducing and less risk-increasing production inputs. Therefore, we apply a unique data set which includes 185 small-scale farmers which are producing rubber on 260 plots on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. The Just-Pope production function indicates that fertiliser usage has a risk-reducing effect, whereas herbicide usage and plot size have risk-increasing effects. For labour and plantation age, the influence on output risk is ambiguous. By including the outcome of a Holt-Laury lottery into the analysis, we found the expected result that more risk averse farmers use more (risk-reducing) fertiliser and less (risk-increasing) herbicides. These consistent results provide an example for the external validity of measuring risk attitude with the Holt-Laury lottery.

This study analyzes the impact of large-scale fee elimination for secondary school girls in The Gambia on the quantity, composition, and achievement of students. The gradual rollout of the program across geographic regions provides identifying variation in the policy. The program increased the number of girls taking the high school exit exam by 55 percent. The share of older test takers increased in poorer districts, expanding access for students who began school late, repeated grades, or whose studies had been interrupted. Despite these changes in the quantity and composition of students, there are robustly positive point estimates of the program on test scores, with suggestive evidence of gains for several subgroups of both girls and boys. Absence of learning declines is notable in a setting where expanded access could strain limited resources and reduce school quality. The findings suggest that financial constraints remain serious barriers to post-primary education, and that efforts to expand access to secondary education need not come at the expense of learning in low-income countries like The Gambia.

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.

We present a lab-field experiment designed to assess systematically the external validity of social preferences elicited in a variety of experimental games. We do this by comparing behavior in the different games with a number of behaviors elicited in the field and with self-reported behaviors exhibited in the past, using the same sample of participants. Our results show that the experimental social-preference games do a poor job in explaining both social behaviors in the field and social behaviors from the past.

Correspondence studies are nowadays viewed as the most compelling avenue to test for hiring discrimination. However, these studies suffer from one fundamental methodological problem, as formulated by Heckman and Siegelman (The Urban Institute audit studies: Their methods and findings. In M. Fix, and R. Struyk (Eds.), Clear and convincing evidence: Measurement of discrimination in America, 1993), namely the bias in their results in case of group differences in the variance of unobserved determinants of hiring outcomes. In this study, the authors empirically investigate this bias in the context of gender discrimination. The authors do not find significant evidence for the feared bias.

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.

We study the causal impact of revealing pro-unionism during the recruitment stage on hiring chances. To this end, we conduct a randomised field experiment in the Belgian labour market. When matched with employer and sector data, the experimentally gathered data enable us to test the heterogeneity of discrimination against pro-union applicants by the union density in the sector and the size of the firm. We find that disclosure of pro-unionism affects hiring chances in a negative way and that-in line with our expectations based on the literature-this negative impact is stronger in highly unionised sectors.

published

Employers want motivated and productive employees. Are there ways to increase employee motivation without relying solely on monetary incentives, such as pay-for-performance schemes? One tool that has shown promise in recent decades for improving worker performance is setting goals, whether they are assigned by management or self-chosen. Goals are powerful motivators for workers, with the potential for boosting productivity in an organization. However, if not chosen carefully or if used in unsuitable situations, goals can have undesired and harmful consequences. Goals are a powerful tool that needs to be applied with caution.

The main goal of our study is to analyze how success and failure in crucial situations affect subsequent individual performance. Our study is based on evidence from a natural experiment of NBA (National Basketball Association) players: Based on play-by-play statistics of NBA games in 10 seasons (1818 observations of 345 sportsmen), we identify players who are responsible for the overtime by taking the last shot of the game. Players who miss the shot when the game is tied perform better in overtime than in the last quarter (within-subject comparison) but not significantly different to their game and season averages. Players who score the equalizer in the last shot of the regular game perform substantially worse in overtime compared to their 4th quarter performance as well as compared to their game and season averages. Yet the average performances in overtime of both groups do not differ significantly (between-subject comparison). We conclude that success in crucial situations leads to lower subsequent individual performance. Psychological explanations for this phenomenon, e.g. the role of overconfidence, are discussed. We argue that our findings can be transferred to behavior after success or failure in business settings since we have distinct identifications of performance and responsibility: the observed overtimes are clear and immediate outcomes of the last shots of our analyzed players; without their success or failure, the game would have been over after regular time.

How do peers influence the impact of incentives? Despite much work on incentives, little is known about the spillover effects of incentives. We investigate two mechanisms by which these effects can occur: through peers' actions and peers' incentives. In a field experiment on snack choice (grapes versus cookies), we randomize who receives incentives, the fraction of peers incentivized, and whether or not it can be observed that peers' choices are incentivized among over 1,500 children in the school lunchroom. Incentives increase the likelihood of initially choosing grapes. However, peer spillover effects can be large enough to undo these positive effects.