Papers - Artefactual

John A List

Cited by*: 11 Downloads*: 77

This special issue highlights an empirical approach that has increasingly grown in prominence in the last decade--field experiments. While field experiments can be used quite generally in economics to test theories' predictions, to measure key parameters, and to provide insights into the generalizability of empirical results, this special issue focuses on using field experiments to explore questions within the economics of charity. The issue contains six distinct field experimental studies that investigate various aspects associated with the economics of charitable giving. The issue also includes a fitting tribute to one of the earliest experimenters to depart from traditional lab methods, Peter Bohm, who curiously has not received deep credit or broad acclaim. Hopefully this issue will begin to rectify this oversight.

Jeff P Carpenter, Erika Seki

Cited by*: 11 Downloads*: 10

Models of job tournaments and competitive workplaces more generally predict that while individual effort may increase as competition intensifies between workers, the incentive for workers to cooperate with each other diminishes. We report on a field experiment conducted with workers from a fishing community in Toyama Bay, Japan. Our participants are employed in three different aspects of fishing. The first group are fishermen, the second group are fish wholesalers (or traders), and the third group are staff at the local fishing coop. Although our participants have much in common (e.g., their common relationship to the local fishery and the fact that they all live in the same community), we argue that they are exposed to different amounts of competition on-the-job and that these differences explain differences in cooperation in our experiment. Specifically, fishermen and traders, who interact in more competitive environments are significantly less cooperative than the coop staff who face little competition on the job. Further, after accounting for the possibility of personality-based selection, perceptions of competition faced on-the-job and the treatment effect of job incentives explain these differences in cooperation to a large extent.

Michael S Haigh, John A List

Cited by*: 10 Downloads*: 15

We compare behavior across students and professional traders from the Chicago Board of Trade in a classic Allais paradox experiment. Our experiment tests whether independence, a necessary condition in expected utility theory, is systematically violated. We find that both students and professionals exhibit some behavior consistent with the Allais paradox, but the data pattern does suggest that the trader population falls prey to the Allais paradox less frequently than the student population.

Orly Sade, Charles Schnitzlein, Jaime Zender

Cited by*: 10 Downloads*: 8

An experimental approach is used to examine the performance of three different multi-unit auction designs: discriminatory, uniform-price with fixed supply, and uniform-price with endogenous supply. We find that the strategies of the individual bidders and the aggregate demand curves are inconsistent with theoretically identified equilibrium strategies. The discriminatory auction is found to be more susceptible to collusion than are the uniform-price auctions, and so contrary to theoretical predictions and previous experimental results the discriminatory auction provides the lowest average revenue. Consistent with theoretical predictions, bidder demands are more elastic with reducible supply or discriminatory pricing than in the uniform-price auction with fixed supply. Despite a lack of a priori differences across bidders, the discriminatory auction results in significantly more symmetric allocations.

Mariah D Ehmke, John A List, Jayson L Lusk

Cited by*: 10 Downloads*: 14

A concern with the contingent valuation method (CVM) is the finding that hypothetical and real statements of value often differ. We test whether hypothetical bias, broadly defined, is independent of location by comparing real and hypothetical votes on a dichotomous choice referendum in China, France, Indiana, Kansas, and Niger. We find significant differences in hypothetical bias across locations and reject the hypothesis that hypothetical bias is independent of location. As opposed to the typical finding reported in the literature, subjects in Niger significantly understated their willingness-to-pay in the hypothetical referendum.

Claude Montmarquette, Jean-Louis Rulliere, Marie-Claire Villeval, Romain Zeiliger

Cited by*: 10 Downloads*: 5

After a merger, company officials face the challenge of making compensation schemes uniform and of redesigning teams with managers from companies with different incentives, work habits and recruiting methods. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between executive pay and performance after a merger by dissociating the respective influence of shifts, which occur in both compensation incentives and team composition. The results of a real effort experiment conducted with managers within a large pharmaceutical company not only show that changes in compensation incentives affect performance but also suggest that the sorting effect of incentives in the previous companies impact cooperation and efficiency after the merger. Replicating this experiment with students showed differences in strategy rather than in substance between the two groups of subjects with managers appearing performance driven while students are more cost driven.

Erwin Bulte, Andreas Kontoleon, John A List, Ty Turley, Maarten Voors

Cited by*: 9 Downloads*: 46

We implement a public goods game and a social intervention modeled after a public goods game in rural Sierra Leone near the Gola Forest Reserve. We also collect demographic, economic and forest conservation data on households in the area. We use this data to assess the mapping of social preferences from the artefactual field experiment (AFE) into real world behavior. We find evidence of heterogeneity in shifting factors between the AFE, the field experiment, and conservation outcomes. We also find evidence that social controls like war violence and witchcraft may explain some of this correlation.

John A List, Jason F Shogren

Cited by*: 9 Downloads*: 8

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Roland Fryer , Steven D Levitt, John A List

Cited by*: 9 Downloads*: 4

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John A List

Cited by*: 9 Downloads*: 12

Walrasian tatonnement has been a fundamental assumption in economics ever since Walras' general equilibrium theory was introduced in 1874. Nearly a century after its introduction, Vernon Smith relaxed the Walrasian tatonnement assumption by showing that neoclassical competitive market theory explains the equilibrating forces in ""double- auction"" markets. I make a next step in this evolution by exploring the predictive power of neoclassical theory in decentralized naturally occurring markets. Using data gathered from two distinct markets--the sports card and collector pin markets--I find a tendency for exchange prices to approach the neoclassical competitive model prediction after a few market periods.

Stefan Luckner, Christof Weinhardt

Cited by*: 9 Downloads*: 12

The results of recent studies on prediction markets are encouraging. Prior experience demonstrates that markets with different incentive schemes predicted uncertain future events remarkably accurately. In this paper, we study the impact of different monetary incentives on prediction accuracy in a field experiment. In order to do so, we compare three groups of traders, corresponding to three treatments with different payment schemes, in a prediction market for the FIFA World Cup 2006. Somewhat surprisingly, our results show that performance-related payment schemes do not necessarily increase the prediction accuracy. Due to the risk aversion of traders the competitive environment in a rank-order tournament leads to the best results in terms of prediction accuracy.

John A List, Daniel Rondeau

Cited by*: 8 Downloads*: 7

Evidence suggests that contributions to capital campaigns increase with the value of leadership gifts. We examine the response of subjects to the announcement of leadership gifts and its implied change in the campaign's target. The two effects are partitioned.

Vegard Iversen, Cecile Jackson, Bereket Kebede, Alistair Munro, Arjan Verschoor

Cited by*: 7 Downloads*: 23

We test core theories of the household using variants of a public good game and experimental data from 240 couples in rural Uganda. Spouses do not maximise surplus from cooperation and realise a greater surplus when women are in charge. This violates assumptions of unitary and cooperative models. When women control the common account, they receive less than when men control it; this contradicts standard bargaining models. Women contribute less than men and are rewarded more generously by men than vice versa. This casts doubt on postulates in Sen (1990). While the absence of altruism is rejected, we find evidence for opportunism. The results are put in a socioeconomic context using quantitative and qualitative survey data. Assortative matching and correlates of bargaining power influence behaviour within the experiments. Our findings suggest that a one-size fits all?? model of the household is unlikely to be satisfactory.

Jeffrey A Flory, Uri Gneezy, Kenneth Leonard, John A List

Cited by*: 7 Downloads*: 68

Gender differences in competitive behavior have received much attention, demonstrating a systematic gap between males' and females' tendencies to compete. Theories predict a biological factor linked to an evolutionary response to the different paths to reproductive success for men and women. Since strategies for reproductive success change over the female life-cycle, the gender gap is predicted to be largest for young adults but after menopause women should be as competitive as men. Using data drawn from two very different societies, we find strong support for this theoretical prediction: competitiveness in women is tightly linked to their biological roles in childrearing.

Michael S Haigh, John A List

Cited by*: 6 Downloads*: 12

An important class of investment decisions is characterized by unrecoverable sunk costs, resolution of uncertainty through time, and the ability to invest in the future as an alternative to investing today. The options model provides guidance in such settings, including an investment decision rule called the "bad news principle": the downside investment state influences the investment decision whereas the upside investment state is ignored. This study takes a new approach to examining predictions of the options model by using the tools of experimental economics. Our evidence, which is drawn from student and professional trader subject pools, is broadly consonant with the options model.

David J Cooper

Cited by*: 6 Downloads*: 13

This paper studies experiments set in a corporate environment where a manager attempts to overcome a history of coordination failure by employees using either financial incentives or communication. I compare the choices of subject managers drawn from a standard undergraduate population with subject managers drawn from the executive MBA (EMBA) program at Case?s Weatherhead School of Management. The EMBA subjects are a group of experienced, successful managers; all of the EMBA subjects have at least ten years of work experience, including at least five years in a supervisory role, and have average annual earnings in excess of $120,000. The EMBA subject managers are able to overcome a history of coordination failure significantly faster than the undergraduate subject managers. This superior performance is driven neither by differences in the financial incentives offered to the employees nor by use of an inherently different communications strategy. Instead, EMBA subject managers are significantly more likely to use the same "good" communication strategy as is identified for undergraduate subject managers through systematic coding of managers messages to employees.

Anya Samek, Roman Sheremeta

Cited by*: 6 Downloads*: 4

We experimentally investigate simultaneous decision-making in two contrasting environments: one that encourages competition (lottery contest) and one that encourages cooperation (public good game). We find that simultaneous participation in the public good game affects behavior in the contest, decreasing sub-optimal overbidding. Contributions to the public good are not affected by participation in the contest. The direction of behavioral spillover is explained by differences in strategic uncertainty and path-dependence across games. Our design allows us to compare preferences for cooperation and competition. We find that in early periods, there is a negative correlation between decisions in competitive and in cooperative environments.

Heike Hennig-Schmidt, Bettina Rockenbach, Abdolkarim Sadrieh

Cited by*: 6 Downloads*: 7

We present a field experiment to assess the effect of own and peer wage variations on actual work effort of employees with hourly wages. Work effort neither reacts to an increase of the own wage, nor to a positive or negative peer comparison. This result seems at odds with numerous laboratory experiments that show a clear own wage sensitivity on effort. In an additional real-effort laboratory experiment we show that explicit cost and surplus information that enables to exactly calculate employer's surplus from the work contract is a crucial pre-requisite for a positive wage-effort relation. This demonstrates that employee's reciprocity requires a clear assessment of the surplus at stake.

Glenn W Harrison

Cited by*: 5 Downloads*: 19

If we are to examine the role of "controls" in different experimental settings, it is appropriate that the word be defined carefully. The Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition) defines the verb "control" in the following manner: "To exercise restraint or direction upon the free action of; to hold sway over, exercise power or authority over; to dominate, command." So the word means something more active and interventionist than is suggested by it's colloquial clinical usage. Control can include such mundane things as ensuring sterile equipment in a chemistry lab, to restrain the free flow of germs and unwanted particles that might contaminate some test.

Matthew McCarter, Anya Samek, Roman Sheremeta

Cited by*: 5 Downloads*: 2

The current social dilemma literature lacks theoretical consensus regarding how individuals behave when facing multiple simultaneous social dilemmas. The divided-loyalty hypothesis, from organizational theory, predicts that cooperation will decline as individuals experience multiple social dilemmas with different compared to the same group members. The conditional-cooperation hypothesis, from behavioral economics, predicts that cooperation will increase as individuals experience multiple social dilemmas with different compared to the same group members. We employ a laboratory experiment to create consensus between these literatures and find support for the conditional-cooperation hypothesis. The positive effect of interacting with different group members comes from participants having an opportunity to shift their cooperative behavior from the less cooperative to the more cooperative group.