Search

This paper reports the results from a randomized educational intervention, that aims to build a forward-looking perspective in children. We evaluate the effects of the intervention on planning, commitment and consumption decisions in an intertemporal task using a temptation good, chocolate. We find that treated children end up consuming less chocolate on the earlier date than control children. This is both because they make more patient consumption plans, and because they exhibit a type of extreme self-control, eating even less than they had planned. Treatment effects are heterogeneous on gender, with treated girls becoming less present-biased (as well as more future-biased).

We study cheating behavior in a large sample of elementary school children in the context of a creative performance task, in the presence and absence of performance incentives. Our data come from a sample of 720 elementary school children with an average age of 8, and contain rich information on a large set of correlates, such as risk and time preferences, IQ, gender and family characteristics. We document that children with higher IQ and higher socioeconomic status have a higher likelihood of cheating. We find that the presence of incentives for better performance does not increase cheating behavior. We also document an interesting interaction between altruism and incentives: altruistic students cheat significantly less in the presence of incentives. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

We theoretically and experimentally analyze public and private feedback in teams that are characterized by different performance technologies. We consider a setting where the principal has some performance relevant private information and can either report this information truthfully or strategically withhold feedback. We find that if team performance is determined by the best performer (the “best-shot technology”), then both public and private feedback are better than no feedback unless the team is composed of all low performers, in which case no feedback is best. If, on the other hand, team performance is determined by the worst performer (the weakest-link technology), then no feedback is the best regime unless the team is composed of all high performers, in which case public or private feedback is better. Our results have implications for feedback policies in teams, organizations, and the workplace.

We report results from a laboratory experiment that explores the effects of preference communication and leader selection mechanisms in group decision-making. In a setting where all members of a group get the same payoff based on the leader's decision of how much risk to take, we study (1) how group members communicate their preferences to the leader, (2) whether and how the leader incorporates the communicated preferences into his/her decision. We vary the leader selection mechanism as a treatment variable and consider cases where the leader is exogenously appointed or voluntarily self-selects into the position. We find that communicated preferences have a significant effect on actual group decisions, and that leaders’ compromise between their own preferences and the preferences of others. The data also reveal that individual characteristics matter in both what kind of suggestions are communicated to the leader, and whether leaders are likely to stick to their own preferences or compromise when making group decisions: Women and individuals who are more trusting of others are more likely to manipulate their own preferences when communicating them and more likely to compromise in response to others’ preferences as leaders.

We study the effect of elementary school teachers' beliefs about gender roles on student achievement. We exploit a natural experiment where teachers are prevented from self-selecting into schools, and, conditional on school, students are allocated to teachers randomly. We show that girls who are taught for longer than a year by teachers with traditional gender views have lower performance in objective math and verbal tests, and this effect is amplified with longer exposure to the same teacher. We find no effect on boys. We show that the effect is partly mediated by teachers' transmitting traditional beliefs to girls., ESRC (MiSoc); ING Bank (Corporate Social Responsibility program); Turkish Academy of Sciences (Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA), GEBIP program); Science Academy (BAGEP program)

We propose a convenient method to run online economic experiments via z-Tree, should a virtual lab with a file server exist. Assuming these technologies are already available in many universities, this method does not require any additional tool or resource. Once the setup is completed, a researcher can run any type of experiment (including interactive tasks) with subjects participating in real time. With the virtual lab architecture, a researcher finds the very same desktop she has in a physical lab; therefore, she does not need to adapt to any different platform. The researcher only needs additional software to communicate with the subjects (e.g., Zoom), but this is probably not a burden since most have already adapted to these applications during the COVID-19 pandemic. We believe that the use of z-Tree through a virtual lab, necessitated by the current lack of access to physical subjects, will continue to provide a convenient method for running online experiments with z-Tree during the pandemic as well as beyond.

This paper experimentally studies individuals’ willingness to pay for the authority to make risky decisions for themselves, and the willingness to take responsibility for others, as primary determinants of leadership willingness. We consider a setup involving a pair of individuals, where one individual is designated to make both parties’ decisions by default. Depending on treatment, either party can express a willingness to pay to change this situation. If one’s willingness to pay to make her own decision herself is positive (negative), we interpret it as a demand for autonomy (a desire to delegate). On the flip side, if one’s willingness to pay to avoid making a decision on behalf of another person is positive (negative), we interpret it as a desire to avoid responsibility (a demand for authority). We find that on average, individuals are willing to pay positive amounts of money to make their decisions themselves, and incur positive but smaller opportunity costs for the right to make decisions for others. Certain individual and contextual characteristics emerge as important predictors. Notably, (1) men are more likely to demand both autonomy and authority at the same time, (2) individuals with other regarding preferences are more likely to pay to avoid taking responsibility for others’ decisions when the probability of loss is high. Exploring differences between individuals’ own decisions and the decisions they make on behalf of others, we find that subjects with other-regarding preferences tend to “cautious-shift” when making decisions on behalf of others. Also, we find that individuals who would like to avoid responsibility also tend to “shift” their decisions when put in a decision-making role. The results have implications for the allocation of decision-making authority in pairs and leadership.

We evaluate the impact of a randomized educational intervention on children's intertemporal choices. The intervention aims to improve the ability to imagine future selves and encourages forward-looking behavior using a structured curriculum delivered by children's own trained teachers. We find that treated students make more patient intertemporal decisions in incentivized experimental tasks. The results persist almost 3 years after the intervention, replicate well in a different sample, and are robust across different experimental elicitation methods. The effects also extend beyond experimental outcomes: we find that treated students are significantly less likely to receive a low behavior grade.

Using data from a large-scale field experiment, we show that while there is no gender difference in the willingness to make risky decisions on behalf of a group in a sample of children, a large gap emerges in a sample of adolescents. The proportion of girls who exhibit leadership willingness drops by 39% going from childhood to adolescence. We explore the possible factors behind this drop and find that it is largely associated with a dramatic decline in “social confidence”, measured by the willingness to perform a real effort task in public.

We show that grit, a non-cognitive skill that has been shown to be highly predictive of achievement, is malleable in the childhood period and can be fostered in the classroom environment. Our evidence comes from an evaluation of a randomized educational intervention implemented in elementary schools in Istanbul. Outcomes are measured via a novel incentivized real effort task and actual school grades on core subjects. We find that treated students are 1) more likely to choose to undertake a more challenging and more rewarding task against an easier but less rewarding alternative, 2) less likely to give up after failure, 3) more likely to exert effort to accumulate task-specific ability, and consequently, 4) more likely to succeed and collect higher payoffs. The intervention also has a significant impact on school grades: We find that treated students are about 3 percentage points more likely to receive top grades in core academic subjects.

Patience and self-control are important non-cognitive skills that are associated with favorable educational, economic and social outcomes. This paper provides empirical evidence to inform discussions on possible educational interventions to make children more forward-looking or less present-biased, by putting forward a way to identify self-control problems in children and exploring the role of commitment devices in mitigating such problems. We report results from an experiment that measures planned allocations, the demand for a commitment device, and actual choices in the context of chocolate consumption over two days. The experiment is conducted as part of a large field study on children's preferences, which allows us to correlate behavior with variables related to the subjects' socio-economic background and educational environment, as well as preference parameters elicited through other tasks and surveys. We find a large demand for commitment among children. In addition, we identify important correlations between patience, commitment demand and time inconsistency, as well as student-specific personality traits and outcomes such as school success.

In neuroeconomics experiments many ocular artifacts are encountered during long trial durations. In this study, results from algorithms used to remove artifacts in EEG measurements are presented. The study consists of three parts. In the first part, EEG signals were band-pass filtered to remove high frequency noise and low frequency drift. Next, the artifacts were removed by using traditional regression method and independent component analysis (ICA). Finally, the performances of the two artifact removal methods were compared. Although artifacts were suppressed better by ICA than regression, ICA caused decrease in root mean square (RMS) values of the non-artifactual parts of some channels.

We study the transmission of risk attitudes in a unique survey of mothers and children in which both participated in an incentivized risk preference elicitation task. We document that risk preferences are correlated between mothers and children when the children are just 7-8 years old. This correlation is only present for daughters. We further show that a measure of maternal involvement is a strong moderator of the association between mothers' and daughters' risk tolerance. This is consistent with a role for socialization and parental investment in the intergenerational transmission of risk preferences., Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK); ESRC Doctoral Fellowship; ESRC; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; College of Administrative Sciences and Economics at Koç University; Turkish Academy of the Sciences

People often demand a greater price when selling goods that they own than they would pay to purchase the same goods-a well-known economic bias called the endowment effect. The endowment effect has been found to be muted among experienced traders, but little is known about how trading experience reduces the endowment effect. We show that when selling, experienced traders exhibit lower right anterior insula activity, but no differences in nucleus accumbens or orbitofrontal activation, compared with inexperienced traders. Furthermore, insula activation mediates the effect of experience on the endowment effect. Similar results are obtained for inexperienced traders who are incentivized to gain trading experience. This finding indicates that frequent trading likely mitigates the endowment effect indirectly by modifying negative affective responses in the context of selling., National Science Foundation (NSF) Human and Social Dynamics (HSD); University of Chicago Wisdom Research Grant; John Templeton Foundation

We theoretically and experimentally analyze the role of verifiability and privacy in strategic performance feedback using a "one principal-two agent" context with real effort. We confirm the theoretical prediction that information transmission occurs only in verifiable feedback mechanisms and private-verifiable feedback is the most informative mechanism. Yet, subjects also exhibit some behavior that cannot be explained by our baseline model, such as telling the truth even when this will definitely hurt them, interpreting "no feedback" more optimistically than they should, and being influenced by feedback given to the other agent. We show that a model with individual-specific lying costs and naive agents can account for some, but not all, of these findings. We conclude that although agents do take into account the principal's strategic behavior to form beliefs in a Bayesian fashion, they are overly optimistic and interpret positive feedback to the other agent more pessimistically than they should. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

We show that grit, a non-cognitive skill that has been shown to be highly predictive of achievement, is malleable in the childhood period and can be fostered in the classroom environment. Our evidence comes from the evaluation of a randomized educational intervention implemented in two independent elementary school samples in Istanbul. Outcomes are measured via a novel incentivized real effort task and performance in standardized tests. We find that treated students are 1) more likely to choose to undertake a more challenging and more rewarding task against an easier but less rewarding alternative, 2) less likely to give up after failure, 3) more likely to exert effort to accumulate task-specific ability, and consequently, 4) more likely to succeed and collect higher payoffs. The intervention also has a large positive impact on students’ standardized test scores. Treated students score 0.28 standard deviations higher in a standardized math test, and 0.13 standard deviations higher in a standardized Turkish test at follow-up.

Being the leader in a group often involves making risky decisions that affect the payoffs of all members, and the decision to take this responsibility in a group is endogenous in many contexts. In this paper, we experimentally study: (1) the willingness of men and women to make risky decisions on behalf of a group, (2) the amount of risk men and women take for the group, in comparison to their individual decisions. We observe a striking difference between males and females, with a much lower fraction of women being willing to make the group decision than men. The amount of risk taken for the group is generally lower than in the case where subjects decide for themselves only, indicating a cautious shift. The women that would like to make the group decision and the women that do not are no different in terms of how much risk they take for themselves, nor for their group. For men, on the other hand, we find that the ones who would like to lead tend to take more risk on behalf of the group. We also present several results on the relationship of risk-taking and leadership decisions with personality traits.

It was previously shown by fMRI studies that unfair offers during an ultimatum bargaining game activate regions in the brain associated with emotions and conflict, leading to decisions inconsistent with standard economic theory. The temporal dynamics of emotional processing and mental attributes were not clear due to the coarse temporal resolution in those studies (∼2 s). Here, the ultimatum game was studied by EEG recorded from the responders in 19 channels. EEG time series were first in-put to independent component analysis. An equivalent current dipole model was used to localize the sources of the independent components in EEGLAB. The Talairach coordinates of the dipoles were matched with references in the Brede neuroinformatics database. Dipole magnitudes, anatomical regions, and mental attributes were used to explain the rejection of the offers by applying multiple regression as a function of time in epochs with a median resolution of 250 ms. The results are consistent with previous studies regarding responder behavior and activated regions (e.g., anterior cingulate cortex, frontal gyrus, insular cortex). There are three main findings observed with the higher temporal resolution: (1) regression results from fine-scale temporal data showed activations not captured when the analysis was done by using time-averaged data; (2) temporal analysis detected the individual significant epochs and fluctuations (positive and negative correlations) in regions and for the associated mental attributes (e.g., reward/harm perception, anger, unfairness); (3) there was a sequential activation of anterior cingulate cortex and insular cortex, respectively, leading to the rejection response. Overall, regression models could explain a large percentage (∼80%) of out-of-sample behavioral responses. The results are promising for the prospect of using EEG and source localization techniques in neuroeconomics to study finer temporal dynamics of neural activation.

In many settings, individuals are confronted with decision problems that involve information relevant to their self-image. This paper uses an experiment to explore whether the self-relevance of information influences information processing. The experiment implements two information processing tasks that are identical from a theoretical perspective, but differ in the type of information provided: performance feedback versus information within the context of a purely statistical updating problem. The results suggest that information processing differs significantly across self-relevant and self-irrelevant contexts. In the self-relevant context, except in cases where initial self-confidence is high, subjects overweigh unfavorable performance feedback, leading to overly pessimistic beliefs. This is in contrast to the corresponding self-irrelevant setup, where departures from Bayes’ rule do not follow a consistent pattern in terms of direction, and are smaller in magnitude. In addition, I find that women may interpret positive feedback more conservatively than men, leading to more pessimistic posteriors.

This paper investigates entry decisions into rst and second price auctions using an experimental design to extract information on willingness-to-pay to enter (WTE). We nd that subjects tend to overpay to enter both auction formats. In particular, if the subjects believe they will be bidding against bidders following the risk-neutral Nash strategy, their WTE is greater than the optimal risk-neutral amount 97% of the time for rst-price auctions (FPA) and 90% for second-price auctions (SPA). If they believe that they are bidding against subjects who bid as do the other subjects, they submit a WTE that is too high 92% of the time for FPA and 69% of the time for SPA. We also nd, in line with previous studies, signicant overbidding in both the FPA and SPA. We then investigate whether introducing risk aversion (RA) or \joy of winning" (JOY) can explain the joint observation of over-entry and overbidding. In particular, using bid data alone, we structurally estimate three models, one allowing RA only, one allowing for JOY only and one allowing for both RA and JOY. While a model with JOY alone overestimates WTE, we nd that RA alone can explain 38% of WTE but a model with both RA and JOY (where RA is estimated using FPA bids, and JOY is estimated using SPA bids) can explain 65% of WTE. Moreover, JOY appears to explain nearly all of the of the male WTE but only 44% of the female WTE.

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.

This study investigates the effects on private saving rates of a number of policy and non-policy variables. The analysis covers the period 1968-1994. The empirical private saving model for Turkey is estimated. The findings support the hypothesis that private saving rates have strong inertia. The evidence indicates that government saving does not tend to crowd out private savings and the Ricardian equivalence does not hold strictly. Income level has a positive impact on private saving rate, and growth rate of income is not statistically significant. From a policy point of view, financial depth and development measures in Turkey suggest that countries with deeper financial systems tend to have higher private saving rates. Private credit and real interest rates try to capture the severity of the borrowing constraints and the degree of financial repression for Turkey. Moreover, the negative impact of life expectancy rate lends support to the life-cycle hypothesis. The precautionary motive for saving is supported by the findings that inflation captures the degree of macro-economic volatility and has a positive impact on private saving in Turkey.

We study the transmission of risk attitudes in a unique survey of mothers and children in which both participated in an incentivized risk preference elicitation task. We document that risk preferences are correlated between mothers and children when the children are just 7 to 8 years old. This correlation is only present for daughters. We show that a measure of parental involvement is a strong moderator of the association between mothers’ and daughters’ risk tolerance. These findings support a role for socialization in the intergenerational transmission of preferences that predict economic behaviour.

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.

We study the transmission of risk attitudes in a unique survey of mothers and children in which both participated in an incentivized risk preference elicitation task. We document that risk preferences are correlated between mothers and children when the children are just 7 to 8 years old. This correlation is only present for daughters. We show that a measure of parental involvement is a strong moderator of the association between mothers’ and daughters’ risk tolerance. These findings support a role for socialization in the intergenerational transmission of preferences that predict economic behaviour. JEL categories: C93, J16, D03.

We study the transmission of risk attititudes in a unique survey of mothers and children in which both participated in an incentivised risk preference elicitation task. We document that risk preferences are correlated between mothers and children when the children are just 7 to 8 years old. This correlation is only present for daughters. We show that a measure of parental involvement is a strong moderator of the association between mothers' and daughers' risk tolerance. These findings support a role for socialisation in the intergenerational transmission of preferences that predict economic behaviour.

Recent literature presents evidence that men are more competitively inclined than women. Since top-level careers usually require competitiveness, competitiveness differences provide an explanation for gender gaps in wages and differences in occupational choice. A natural question is whether women are born less competitive or whether they become so through the process of socialization. To pinpoint when in the socialization process the difference arises, we compare the competitiveness of children in matrilineal and patriarchal societies. We find that while there is no difference at any age in the matrilineal society, girls become less competitive around puberty in the patriarchal society., National Science Foundation; European Union (Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant)

This paper explores the effect of personality traits on: (1) the willingness to make risk-taking decisions on behalf of a group, (2) the nature of "choice shifts", i.e. the difference between the amount of risk taken in the group context and individually. Openness and agreeableness emerge as significant determinants of the willingness to lead: non-leader women and non-leader men score lower on openness and higher in agreeableness compared to both leader men and leader women. Neuroticism explains the within-gender variance in individual risk-taking among women, who are on average more risk-averse than men. Subjects in general behave more cautiously when they are making risky decisions on behalf of a group. Among men, a higher agreeableness score implies higher caution in group decisions, while conscientiousness leads to less caution. In contrast, among women, a higher conscientiousness score implies higher caution in the group context, suggesting that the two genders might interpret the social norms in group decision-making differently.

The canonical bargaining game in economics is the ultimatum game, played by tens of thousands of students around the world over the past three decades. In the ultimatum game, first studied by Werner Guth, Rolf Schmittberger, and Bernd Schwarze (1982), the “proposer” proposes how to split a pie between herself and a “responder.” Then the responder decides whether to accept or reject this proposal. If the responder accepts, then the proposal is implemented; otherwise, both players receive nothing. For players motivated purely by monetary considerations, the standard subgame-perfect equilibrium solution implies that the proposer receives almost all of the money. In this manner, the ultimatum game represents a stylized glimpse into the underpinnings of decision-making at the heart of economics. For instance, a monopolist setting a price, a monopsonist setting a wage, or more generally any bargaining situation that has a take it or leave it element.

An important line of recent literature has found gender differences in attitudes toward competition, with men being more likely to choose competitive incentive schemes, even when factors such as ability and risk aversion are controlled for. This paper examines the effect of information on the gender gap in tournament entry. We present experimental evidence that the competitiveness difference between men and women declines significantly when individuals are given performance feedback before making their incentive scheme choice. The result suggests that policies that reduce uncertainty can reduce the gender gap in tournament entry.