Search

The power of technology to transform religions, science, and political institutions has often been presented as nothing short of revolutionary. Does technology have a similarly transformative influence on societies’ morality? Scholars have not rigorously investigated the role of technology in moral revolutions, even though existing research on technomoral change suggests that this role may be considerable. In this paper, we explore what the role of technology in moral revolutions, understood as processes of radical group-level moral change, amounts to. We do so by investigating four historical episodes of radical moral change in which technology plays a noteworthy role. Our case-studies illustrate the plurality of mechanisms involved in technomoral revolutions, but also suggest general patterns of technomoral change, such as technology’s capacity to stabilize and destabilize moral systems, and to make morally salient phenomena visible or invisible. We find several leads to expand and refine conceptual tools for analysing moral change, specifically by crystallizing the notions of ‘technomoral niche construction’ and ‘moral payoff mechanisms’. Coming to terms with the role of technology in radical moral change, we argue, enriches our understanding of moral revolutions, and alerts us to the depths of which technology can change our societies in wanted and unwanted ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiments on choice under risk typically involve multiple decisions by individual subjects. The choice of mechanism for selecting decision(s) for payoff is an essential design feature unless subjects isolate each one of the multiple decisions. We report treatments with different payoff mechanisms but the same decision tasks. The data show large differences across mechanisms in subjects' revealed risk preferences, a clear violation of isolation. We illustrate the importance of these mechanism effects by identifying their implications for classical tests of theories of decision under risk. We discuss theoretical properties of commonly used mechanisms, and new mechanisms introduced herein, in order to clarify which mechanisms are theoretically incentive compatible for which theories. We identify behavioral properties of some mechanisms that can introduce bias in elicited risk preferences-from cross-task contamination-even when the mechanism used is theoretically incentive compatible. We explain that selection of a payoff mechanism is an important component of experimental design in many topic areas including social preferences, public goods, bargaining, and choice under uncertainty and ambiguity as well as experiments on decisions under risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While experimental methods have been an effective tool for economic research, there have been controversies on the methodological aspects. The reason why we need to care about it is clear: if the method in an experiment is not valid, the results from that experiment cannot be valid too. Among other things, the methodological issues of financial incentives and repetition, which are norms in experimental economics, have been at the centre of many debates. While there are previous reviews that investigate financial incentives and repetition separately, our view is that the effects of these two factors are interdependent rather than independent. Thus, our review here is more specific and more conditional, that is, we are interested in the answer to the question, ‘Do we need to use financial incentives conditional on the use of repetition?’ After we discuss the relationship between financial incentives and repetition, we argue, from a review of 44 experimental studies, that using financial incentives would be more necessary to improve the validity of experimental results if an experimenter needs to use repetition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]