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The rise of a new power may lead the dominant power to seek a preventive war. We study this scenario in an experimental two-stage bargaining game. In each stage, the rising power makes a bargaining offer and the declining power must choose whether to accept it or fight. Between the two stages, the winning probability shifts towards the rising power. We find fewer preventive wars when the power shift is smaller and when the rising state has the commitment power. Communication and repeated interaction decrease the likelihood of preventive wars. High fighting costs almost eliminate such wars when the rising power's first-stage offer is sufficiently large.

In a social network in which friendly and rival bilateral links can be formed, how do alliances between decision-makers form, and what determines whether a conflict will arise? We study a network formation game between ex-ante symmetric players in the laboratory to examine the dynamics of alliance formation and conflict evolution. A peaceful equilibrium yields the greatest social welfare, while a successful bullying attack transfers the victimized player's resources evenly to the attackers at a cost. Consistently with the theoretical model predictions, peaceful and bullying outcomes are prevalent among the randomly re-matched experimental groups, based on the cost of attack. We further examine the dynamics leading to the final network and find that groups tend to coordinate quickly on a first target for attack, while the first attacker entails a non-negligible risk of successful counter-attack by initiating the coordination. These findings provide insights for understanding social dynamics in group coordination.

Resumen del trabajo presentado en el 6th International Meeting on Experimental and Behavioral Social Sciences (IMEBESS), celebrado en Utrech (Países Bajos), del 2 al 4 de mayo de 2019, In a one-shot two-person lab experiment we study how behavior is affected by whether player 1 reads the message that player 2 has sent him/her. The issue of one’s communication being considered is relevant in organizations, bargaining and in public decision-making. Our work is motivated by our general interest in how free-form communication affects economic behavior. We have data from three treatments: Optional Communication (N=220), Fixed Communication (N=110) and No Communication (N=110), with the two latter treatments acting as controls. The experiment has two stages. In stage 1 of Optional Communication, player 1 has to choose between two payoff distributions affecting both players 1 and 2. Before player 1 makes the decision, player 2 can send a free-form message to player 1. Before player 1 makes the decision he can choose to read the message or not. In stage 2, player 2 can reward or punish player 1. We study behavior in two different tasks, which differ in the two payoff distributions that are possible. In task 1 (task 2) player 1 has to choose between the following payoff distributions: A ($24, $6) and B ($18, $12) (A ($24, $6) B ($4, $26)). In task 1 player’s 1 decision can be easily influenced by player 2’s message, whereas in task 2 it seems less likely that player 1 can be influenced. The experiments were run at the MONLEE lab at Monash using z-tree. The results show that player 2’s behavior is consistent with reacting differently to kind and unkind treatment and not by whether he/she is listened to or not. Player 1’s behavior is consistent with curiosity or respect and not with the exploitation of moral wiggle room or self-image concerns. We relate our results to several models of social preferences.

We study escalation and aggression in an experimental first-strike game in which two participants play multiple rounds of a money-earning task. In each round, both players can spend money to accumulate weapons. The player with more weapons can spend money to strike against the other player, which almost totally eliminates the victim's earnings potential and removes their capacity to strike. Weapons can serve as a means of deterrence. In four treatments, we find that deterrence is strengthened if weapon stocking cannot be observed, that a balance of power is effective in maintaining peace, and that mutually beneficial trade decreases the risk of confrontation, but not necessarily the likelihood of costly arms races.

Communication has been regarded as one of the most effective devices in promoting team cooperation. But asymmetric communication sometimes breeds collusion and is detrimental to team efficiency. Here, we present experimental evidence showing that excluding one member from team communication hurts team cooperation: the communicating partners collude in profit allocation against the excluded team member, and the latter reacts by refraining from exerting effort. We further show that allowing the partners to reach out to the excluded member helps to restore cooperation and fairness in profit allocation. But it does not stop the partners from talking behind the other member. They sometimes game the system by tricking the excluded member to contribute but then grabbing all profits for themselves.

Trabajo presentado en el EUI Interdisciplinary Experimental Working Group, organizado por el European University Institute, en Italia, el 12 de octubre de 2017, In an experimental study of a modified dictator game, a recipient can send out a message to a proposer before the proposer makes the payoff division. The proposer can choose to ignore the message. Then in the next stage, before revealing proposers’ decisions, recipients can punish or reward proposers at their own costs conditional on which payoff division was made and whether messages were read. We show that 1) recipients tend to punish more harshly when they read recipients’ messages but still selected a more selfish payoff division; however, 2) recipients tend to reward more generously when they did not read recipients’ messages and nonetheless selected a more prosocial payoff division. Our findings suggest that people do not simply interpret failing to hear one’s voice out as disrespectful. It seems that respect is more about whether the ask is followed than whether the voice was heard

This paper investigates the contribution of social comparison effects to the disappointment aversion previously identified in a two-person real-effort competition (Gill and Prowse, 2012). "Social" and "asocial" versions of the Gill and Prowse experiment are compared, where the latter treatment involves a competition against Nature and removes the scope for social comparisons. If disappointment aversion simply reflects an asymmetric evaluation of losses and gains it is expected to survive in the asocial treatment, whereas treatment differences are expected if losing to or winning against another person affects the evaluation of losses/gains. The main result is that behaviour is very similar in social and asocial treatments, suggesting that social comparisons have little impact in this setting. Two other unexpected findings of the paper are that prize effects are much weaker than those identified in Gill and Prowse (2012) and, in neither treatment is there evidence of disappointment aversion.

We introduce the “ball-catching task”, a novel computerized task, which combines a tangible action (“catching balls”) with induced material cost of effort. The central feature of the ball-catching task is that it allows researchers to manipulate the cost of effort function as well as the production function, which permits quantitative predictions on effort provision. In an experiment with piece-rate incentives we find that the comparative static and the point predictions on effort provision are remarkably accurate. We also present experimental findings from three classic experiments, namely, team production, gift exchange and tournament, using the task. All of the results are closely in line with the stylized facts from experiments using purely induced values. We conclude that the ball-catching task combines the advantages of real effort tasks with the use of induced values, which is useful for theory-testing purposes as well as for applications.