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BackgroundWidespread vaccination is certainly a critical element in successfully fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. We apply theories of social identity to design targeted messaging to reduce vaccine hesitancy among groups with low vaccine uptake, such as African Americans and political conservatives.MethodsParticipants. We conducted an online experiment from April 7 to 27, 2021, that oversampled Black, Latinx, conservative, and religious U.S. residents. We first solicited the vaccination status of over 10,000 individuals. Of the 4,609 individuals who reported being unvaccinated, 4,190 enrolled in our covariate-adaptive randomized trial.Interventions. We provided participants messages that presented the health risks of COVID-19 to oneself and others; they also received messages about the benefits of a COVID-19 vaccine and an endorsement by a celebrity. Messages were randomly tailored to each participant's identities-Black, Latinx, conservative, religious, or being a parent.Outcomes. Respondents reported their intent to obtain the vaccine for oneself and, if a parent, for one's child.ResultsWe report results for the 2,621 unvaccinated respondents who passed an incentivized manipulation check. We find no support for the hypothesis that customized messages or endorsers reduce vaccine hesitancy among our segments. A post hoc analysis finds evidence that a vaccine endorsement from Dr. Fauci reduces stated intent to vaccinate among conservatives.ConclusionsWe find no evidence that tailoring public-health communication regarding COVID-19 vaccination for broad demographic groups would increase its effectiveness. We recommend further research on communicators and endorsers, as well as incentives.

Sustaining cooperation in social dilemmas is a fundamental objective in the social and biological sciences. Although providing a punishment option to community members in the public goods game (PGG) has been shown to effectively promote cooperation, this has some serious disadvantages; these include destruction of a societys physical resources as well as its overall social capital. A more efficient approach may be to instead employ a reward mechanism. We propose an endogenous reward mechanism that taxes the gross income of each rounds PGG play and assigns the amount to a fund; each player then decides how to distribute his or her share of the fund as rewards to other members of the community. Our mechanism successfully reverses the decay trend and achieves a high level of contribution with budget-balanced rewards that require no external funding, an important condition for practical implementation. Simulations based on type-specific estimations indicate that the payoff-based conditional cooperation model explains the observed treatment effects well.

Numerous studies have compared the performance of individuals and teams at solving intellective problems.  The ubiquitous finding in the economics literature is that teams out-perform individuals.  This result is intuitively appealing, as teams can benefit from sharing insights.  We analyze experiments comparing the performance of teams and individuals at solving a series of challenging logic puzzles.  Contrary to the existing literature, individuals meet or exceed the performance of teams on all measures.  If we impose a small cost of communication on teams, the performance of teams improves to closely resemble the performance of individuals.  Underlying these results is a definite negative relationship between frequency of communication and team performance.  We also document a strong gender effect.  Teams with more women perform considerably better even though men slightly outperform women when solving the puzzles individually.

We conduct a laboratory experiment in which participants can make donations to real charities. We vary whether the experimenter provides matching funds for any such donations, and whether there is individual or team competition for these matching funds. Our results indicate that providing matching funds for all donations does increase donations from 23% to 33% of the endowment. While individual competition for matching funds had nearly the same effectiveness as matching all donations, by far the most effective approach was to form (anonymous) teams that competed for matching funds; this led to donations of 47% of the endowment. We appeal to the notion of group identity to explain our results--participants seemed to be reluctant to 'let down their team' in a competition. Our results can be seen as providing support for the notion that combining group identity and competition creates a motivation that can potentially be harnessed effectively for prosocial purposes. History: Accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics. Funding: The Science of Philanthropy Institute graciously provided the funding for this experiment. Keywords: charitable contributions * laboratory experiment * matching funds * competition * team competition * group identity, 1. Introduction An issue of considerable economic importance is how to encourage philanthropic activity. In the United States, $324 billion was donated to charitable organizations in 2015, with more than [...]

Creativity is a complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon that has hardly been considered byeconomists, despite a great deal of economic importance. This paper presents a series ofexperiments where subjects face creativity tasks where, in one case, ex-ante goals and constraintsare imposed on their answers, and in the other case no restrictions apply. The effects of financialincentives in stimulating creativity in both types of tasks is then tested, together with the impactof personal features like risk and ambiguity aversion. Our findings show that, in general,financial incentives affect “in-box” (constrained) creativity, but do not facilitate “blue sky”(unconstrained) creativity. However, in the latter case incentives do play a role for ambiguityaverseagents, who tend to be significantly less creative and seem to need extrinsic motivation toexert effort in a task whose odds of success they don’t know. We do find that measures ofcreative style, sensation-seeking preferences, and past involvement in artistic endeavors arerelated to our creativity score, but do not find any difference across gender for either form ofcreativity.

Unethical behavior within organizations is not rare. We investigate experimentallythe role of status-seeking behavior in sabotage and cheating activities aiming at improving one’sperformance ranking in a flat-wage environment. We find that average effort is higher whenindividuals are informed about their relative performance. However, ranking feedback alsofavors disreputable behavior. Some individuals do not hesitate to incur a cost to improve theirrank by sabotaging others’ work or by increasing artificially their own performance. Introducingsabotage opportunities has a strong detrimental effect on performance. Therefore, rankingincentives should be used with care. Inducing group identity discourages sabotage among peersbut increases in-group rivalry.

This paper estimates social effects of incentivizing people in teams. In two fieldexperiments featuring exogenous team formation and opportunities for repeated socialinteractions, we find large team effects that operate through social channels. The teamcompensation system induced agents to choose effort as if they valued a marginal dollar ofcompensation for their teammate from two-thirds as much (in one study) to twice as much asthey valued a dollar of their own compensation (in the other study). We conclude that socialeffects of monetary team incentives exist and can induce effort at lower cost than through directindividual payment.

In the past decade, it has become increasingly common to use simple laboratorygames and decision tasks as a device for measuring both the preferences and understanding ofrural populations in the developing world. In this paper, we report the results observed with threedistinct risk elicitation mechanisms, using samples drawn from the rural population in Senegal,West Africa. We test the understanding of and the level of meaningful responses to the typicalHolt-Laury task, to an adaptation of a simple binary mechanism pioneered by Gneezy andPotters in 1997, and to a non-incentivized willingness-to-risk scale. We find a low level ofunderstanding with the Holt-Laury task and an unlikely-to-be-accurate pattern with thewillingness-to-risk question. Our analysis indicates that the simple binary mechanism hassubstantially more predictive power than does the Holt-Laury mechanism. Our study is acautionary note regarding utilizing either relatively sophisticated risk-elicitation mechanisms ornon-incentivized questions in the rural developing world.

Unethical behavior within companies is not rare. We investigate experimentally therole of status-seeking behavior in sabotage and cheating activities aiming at improving one’sperformance ranking in a flat-wage environment. We find that average effort is higher whenindividuals are informed about their relative performance. However, ranking feedback alsofavors disreputable behavior. Some individuals do not hesitate to incur a cost to improve theirrank by sabotaging others’ work or by increasing artificially their own performance. Introducingsabotage opportunities has a strong detrimental effect on performance. Therefore, rankingincentives should be used with care. Inducing group identity discourages sabotage among peersbut increases in-group rivalry.

We study experimentally how the ability to communicate affects the frequency andeffectiveness of flexible and inflexible contracts in a bilateral trade context where sellers canadjust trade quality after observing a post-contractual cost shock and a discretionary buyertransfer. In the absence of communication, we find that rigid contracts are more frequent andlead to higher earnings for both buyer and seller. By contrast, in the presence of communication,flexible contracts are much more frequent and considerably more productive, both for buyers andsellers. Also, both buyer and seller earn considerably more from flexible with communicationthan rigid without communication. Our results show quite strongly that communication, a normalfeature in contracting, can remove the potential cost of flexibility (disagreements caused byconflicting perceptions). We offer an explanation based on social norms.

The notions of one’s social identity, group membership, and homophily have recentlybecome topics for economic theory and experiments. Yet, since people are members of manygroups (e.g., race, gender, handedness) what determines which identity or identities are the mostsalient in different environments? Further, how do these factors trade off against one’s financialinterest? We conduct public-goods experiments in which we permit endogenous group-formationand vary whether there is a team-building exercise and whether some people receive anendowment twice as much as others receive. We do see evidence that team identity affectsendogenous networks when there is only one endowment type; however, when both identities arepresent, high-endowment participants are strongly attracted to linking up with each other. Oneinteresting result is that the team-building exercise greatly increases the level of contributionwithout respect to whether one is linked to people from one’s team-building exercise.Apparently the positive feeling engendered by the group exercise spills over to participants whowere in another team; however, this is not the case when one group has been in a 4-person teamand the other four participants have not.

We investigate the nature of continuous-time strategic interactions in public-goodsgames. In one set of treatments, four subjects make contribution decisions in continuous timewhile in another they make them only at discrete points of time. The effect of continuous timeis muted in public-goods games compared to simpler social dilemmas; the data suggest thatwidespread coordination problems are to blame. With a rich communication protocol, thesecoordination problems disappear and the median subject contributes fully to the public good,with no time decay. At the median, the same communication protocol is less than half aseffective in discrete time.

We study behavior and equilibrium selection in experimental network games. We varytwo important factors: (a) actions are either strategic substitutes or strategic complements, and(b) subjects have either complete or incomplete information about the structure of a randomnetwork. Play conforms strongly to the theoretical predictions, providing an impressivebehavioral confirmation of the Galeotti, Goyal, Jackson, Vega-Redondo, and Yariv (2010)model. The degree of equilibrium play is striking, even with incomplete information. We findthat under complete information, subjects typically play the stochastically-stable (inefficient)equilibrium when the game involves strategic substitutes, but play the efficient one with strategiccomplements. Our results suggest that equilibrium multiplicity may not be a major concern.Subjects’ actions and realized outcomes under incomplete information depend strongly on boththe degree and the connectivity. When there are multiple equilibria, subjects begin by playing theefficient equilibrium, but eventually converge to the inefficient one.