1,721,060 research outputs found
A fine rule from a brutish world? An experiment on endogenous punishment institution and trust
Full text linkBy means of a laboratory experiment, we study the impact of the endogenous adoption of a collective punishment mechanism within a one-shot binary trust game. The experiment comprises three games. In the first one, the only equilibrium strategy is not to trust, and not to reciprocate. In the second we exogenously introduce a sanctioning rule that imposes on untrustworthy second-movers a penalty proportional to the number of those who reciprocate trust. This generates a second equilibrium where everybody trusts and reciprocates. In the third game, the collective punishment mechanism is adopted through majority-voting. In line with the theory, we find that the exogenous introduction of the punishment mechanism significantly increases trustworthiness, and to a lesser extent also trust. However, in the third game the majority of subjects vote against it: subjects seem to be unable to endogenously adopt an institution which, when exogenously imposed, proves to be efficiency enhancing
JESA in the time of COVID
Full text linkThis is not what we had planned as our first editorial. We had envisioned that in the first or second issue after we took over as editors of JESA, we would include an editorial where we would lay out the plans we had to make JESA an even more attractive outlet. Instead, just a few weeks after we started, as many others we were affected by the simultaneous increase of teaching effort due to the switch to the online mode, school closures, and irregular child care. Thus, from early on, we barely managed to keep track with daily business, in times accumulating large backlogs of papers to process and our first editorial appears closer to the end of our term, which is due in 2022, than to its beginning
Money is more than memory
Full text linkImpersonal exchange is the hallmark of an advanced society and money is one key institution that supports it. Economic theory regards money as a crude arrangement for monitoring counterparts’ past conduct. If so, then a public record of past actions—or memory—should supersede the function performed by money. This intriguing theoretical postulate remains untested. In an experiment, we show that the suggested functional equivalence between money and memory does not translate into an empirical equivalence: money removed the incentives to free ride, while memory did not. Monetary systems performed a richer set of functions than just revealing past behaviors
Cooperation among strangers with and without a monetary system
Full text linkHuman societies prosper when their members move beyond local exchange and cooperate
with outsiders in the creation of wealth. Collaboration of this type presents
formidable challenges because interaction is impersonal, reciprocity is unfeasible
and trust cannot be easily established. Here we study this cooperation problem by
modeling strategic interaction among strangers through an Intertemporal Exchange
Game. The setup can be easily implemented in the laboratory to study a variety of
cooperation-enhancing institutions. In particular, we study the role of a fiat monetary
system by introducing intrinsically worthless tokens that can be offered in
exchange for cooperation. The experiments show that a monetary system spontaneously
emerges in the laboratory, and is a key institution to promote cooperation
among strangers
Economic Polarization and Antisocial Behavior: An Experiment (dataset)
No full textEconomic inequality may fuel frustration, possibly leading to anger and antisocial behavior. We experimentally study a situation where only the rich can reduce inequality while the poor can express their discontent by destroying the wealth of a rich counterpart with whom they had no previous interaction. We test whether the emergence of such form of antisocial behavior depends only on the level of inequality, or also on the conditions under which inequality occurs. We compare an environment in which the rich can unilaterally reduce inequality with one where generosity makes them vulnerable to exploitation by the poor. We observe that the poor engage in forms of antisocial behavior more often when reducing inequality would be safe for the rich. These results cannot be rationalized by inequality aversion alone, while they are in line with recent models that focus on anger as the result of the frustration of expectations. Indeed, we find that the rich are expected to be more generous in the safe scenario than in the risky one, but in fact this hope is systematically violated
How to Discipline Financial Markets: Reputation is Not Enough
No full textHistorically, shocks originating in the financial sector often spilled over into the real sector with dramatic consequences. We study in the lab how interventions targeting disclosure and capital requirements of financial intermediaries can reduce insolvencies or prevent their negative effects from propagating to the broader economy. In our two-sector economy, consumers and producers can fund financial intermediaries, who in turn provide them with liquidity to settle trades. However, intermediaries may undertake risky investments and become insolvent, which depresses real economic activity. In the experiment, insolvencies were frequent. As a consequence, consumers and producers often refused to fund intermediaries, which lowered the trade volume. Imposing the disclosure of risky investments did not reduce risk-taking and insolvencies. Instead, imposing capital requirements prevented insolvencies from disrupting real economic activity, thus boosting financial intermediation and trade
Partners or Strangers? Cooperation, monetary trade, and the choice of scale of interaction
Full text linkWe show that monetary exchange facilitates the transition from small to large-scale economic interactions. In an experiment, subjects chose to play an “intertemporal cooperation game” either in partnerships or in groups of strangers where payoffs could be higher. Theoretically, a norm of mutual support is sufficient to maximize efficiency through large-scale cooperation. Empirically, absent a monetary system, participants were reluctant to interact on a large scale; and when they did, efficiency plummeted compared to partnerships because cooperation collapsed. This failure was reversed only when a stable monetary system endogenously emerged: the institution of money mitigated strategic uncertainty problems
Amoral Familism, Social Capital, or Trust? The Behavioural Foundations of the Italian North-South Divide
Full text linkWe present the first lab-in-the field experiment on the Italian North-South divide. Using a representative sample of the population, we measure whether regional disparities in ability to cooperate emerge even if differences in geography, institutions, and criminal intrusion are silenced. We report that a behavioural gap in cooperation exists: Northern and Southern citizens react differently to the same incentives. Moreover, this gap cannot be accounted for by tolerance for risk, proxies of social capital, and ’amoral familism.’ At least a share of North-South disparities is likely to derive from persistent differences in social norms
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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