1,721,024 research outputs found
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Dictator game giving: altruism or artefact?
Full text linkExperimental dictator games have been used to explore unselfish behaviour. Evidence is presented here, however, that subjects’ generosity can be reversed by allowing them to take a partner’s money. Dictator game giving therefore does not reveal concern for consequences to others existing independently of the environment, as posited in rational choice theory. It may instead be an artefact of experimentation. Alternatively, evaluations of options depend on the composition of the choice set. Implications of these possibilities are explored for experimental methodology and charitable donations respectively. The data favour the artefact interpretation, suggesting that demand characteristics of experimental protocols merit investigation, and that economic analysis should not exclude context-specific social norms
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Experimental economics and the artificiality of alteration
No full textA neglected critique of social science laboratories alleges that they implement phenomena different to those supposedly under investigation. This charge was previously made against laboratory social psychology but applies also to the economics lab. The critique purports to be conceptual and so invulnerable to a technical solution. I argue that, in addition to questioning some specific experiments seeking to implement features of real societies, it constitutes a plausible argument that laboratory economics experiments are necessarily less demonstrative than natural scientific ones. More radical sceptical conclusions are unwarranted
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Control without deception: Individual behaviour in free-riding experiments revisited
Full text linkLying to participants offers an experimenter the enticing prospect of making "others' behaviour" a controlled variable, but is eschewed by experimental economists because it may pollute the pool of subjects. This paper proposes and implements a new experimental design, the Conditional Information Lottery, which offers all the benefits of deception without actually deceiving anyone. The design should be suitable for most economics experiments, and works by a modification of an already standard device, the Random Lottery incentive system. The deceptive scenarios of designs which use deceit are replaced with fictitious scenarios, each of which, from a subject's viewpoint, has a chance of being true. The design is implemented in a sequential play public good experiment prompted by Weimann's (1994) result, from a deceptive design, that subjects are more sensitive to free-riding than cooperation on the part of others. The experiment provides similar results to Weimann's, in that subjects are at least as cooperative when uninformed about others' behaviour as they are if reacting to high contributions. No deception is used and the data cohere well both internally and with other public goods experiments. In addition, simultaneous play is found to be more efficient than sequential play, and subjects contribute less at the end of a sequence than at the start. The results suggest pronounced elements of overconfidence, egoism and (biased) reciprocity in behaviour, which may explain decay in contributions in repeated play designs. The experiment shows there is a workable alternative to deception
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Conformity and reciprocity in public good provision
No full textPeople contribute more to experimental public goods the more others contribute, a tendency called “crowding-in.” We propose a novel experimental design to distinguish two possible causes of crowding-in: reciprocity, the usual explanation, and conformity, a neglected alternative. Subjects are given the opportunity to react to contributions of a payoff-irrelevant group, in addition to their own group. We find evidence of conformity, accounting for roughly 1/3 of crowding-in
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The experimetrics of public goods: inferring motivations from contributions
No full textIn public goods experiments, stochastic choice, censoring and motivational heterogeneity give scope for disagreement over the extent of unselfishness, and whether it is reciprocal or altruistic. We show that these problems can be addressed econometrically, by estimating a finite mixture model to isolate types, incorporating double censoring and a tremble term. Most subjects act selfishly, but a substantial proportion are reciprocal with altruism playing only a marginal role. Isolating reciprocators enables a test of Sugden’s model of voluntary contributions. We estimate that reciprocators display a self-serving bias relative to the model
Who emits most? An analysis of UK households' CO2 emissions and their association with socio-economic factors
No full textEffective emissions reduction policies are required to avoid dangerous climate change. The redistributive impacts resulting from those policies will be relevant for their public acceptability. This project first examines the distribution of CO2 emissions across UK households. Second, it will explore the potential distribution of financial burdens across UK households resulting from a range of climate change mitigation policies. Households that will be most vulnerable to CO2 reduction policies will be identified. The project will develop a household emissions dataset by combining data from the Living Cost and Food Survey with energy prices and emission factors for specific expenditure items. This database will then be used to estimate the distribution of CO2 emissions across UK households, comparing different categories of emissions (home energy, transport, indirect and total household emissions). The project will also analyse the impact of different socio-demographic factors on household CO2 emissions. In particular, we will compare the importance of different factors for low and high income households, enabling us to identify potentially vulnerable households in low income groups.</span
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Who bears the brunt? Distributional effects of climate change mitigation policies
No full textClimate change scholars generally urge that CO2 emissions need to be cut rapidly if we are to avoid dangerous risks of climate change. However, climate change mitigation policies are widely perceived to have regressive effects – that is, putting a higher financial burden as a proportion of household income on poor than on rich households. This is one of several major barriers to the adoption of effective mitigation policies. They would also have considerable social justice implications requiring significant welfare state responses. We assess the claim that climate change policies have regressive effects by comparing different types of mitigation policies. We will argue that many of these are indeed likely to have regressive distributional implications but that there are several policy options to counteract regressive effects. <br/
Experimental economics: rethinking the rules
No full textSince the 1980s, there has been explosive growth in the use of experimental methods in economics, leading to exciting developments in economic theory and policy. Despite this, the status of experimental economics remains controversial. In Experimental Economics, the authors draw on their experience and expertise in experimental economics, economic theory, the methodology of economics, philosophy of science, and the econometrics of experimental data to offer a balanced and integrated look at the nature and reliability of claims based on experimental research.The authors explore the history of experiments in economics, provide examples of different types of experiments, and show that the growing use of experimental methods is transforming economics into a genuinely empirical science. They explain that progress is being held back by an uncritical acceptance of folk wisdom regarding how experiments should be conducted, a failure to acknowledge that different objectives call for different approaches to experimental design, and a misplaced assumption that principles of good practice in theoretical modeling can be transferred directly to experimental design. Experimental Economics debates how such limitations might be overcome, and will interest practicing experimental economists, nonexperimental economists wanting to interpret experimental research, and philosophers of science concerned with the status of knowledge claims in economics.<br/
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Identifying and explaining framing strategies of low carbon lifestyle movement organisations
Full text linkOver the last decade we have seen the growth and development of low carbon lifestyle movement organisations, which seek to encourage members of the public to reduce their personal energy use and carbon emissions. As a first step to assess the transformational potential of such organisations, this paper examines the ways in which they frame their activities. This reveals an important challenge they face: in addressing the broader public, do they promote ‘transformative’ behaviours or do they limit themselves to encouraging ‘easy changes’ to maintain their appeal? We find evidence that many organisations within this movement avoid ‘transformative’ frames. The main reasons for this are organisers’ perceptions that transformational frames lack resonance with broader audiences, as well as wider cultural contexts that caution against behavioural intervention. The analysis draws on interviews with key actors in the low carbon lifestyle movement and combines insights from the literatures on collective action framing and lifestyle movements
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