19 results
Improving compliance with COVID-19 guidance: a workplace field experiment
- Danae Arroyos-Calvera, Michalis Drouvelis, Johannes Lohse, Rebecca McDonald
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- Behavioural Public Policy , First View
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- 20 November 2023, pp. 1-23
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Compliance with hygiene and other safety measures in the workplace was an important component of society's strategy for reducing infections at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular before vaccinations were widely available. We report the results of a field trial of well-established behavioural interventions (social norms, pledging and messenger effects) we implemented to improve compliance with such measures in an occupational setting. We use daily reports of own and other's behaviour to assess the effects of these interventions and supplement these subjective (self-reported) measures with objective data on hand sanitiser usage. The behavioural interventions tested have statistically significant but quantitatively moderate effects on subjective compliance measures and minimal effects on hand sanitiser usage. All effects of our interventions are short-term in nature and dissipate shortly after implementation. Our findings thus provide at most weak support for the notion that typical behavioural interventions can help support compliance with infection prevention measures in the workplace.
5 - Public Good Games II
- Michalis Drouvelis, University of Birmingham
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- Social Preferences
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- 22 December 2023
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Summary
Introduction
Following our discussion in Chapter 4, we will next consider part of the experimental literature in public good games that looks at how we can improve our understanding of issues of human cooperation in the presence of free-riding incentives. Given the bulk of research that has been conducted in this topic, we have devoted this second public good games chapter, focusing on a number of key behavioural determinants of cooperative behaviour. The selection of the topics discussed is a combination of their centrality and influence they have played in the experimental public good literature but also reflects part of my own research interests.
The first topic that we will explore in this chapter relates to the impact of communication on pro-social behaviour. This is one of the most popular and well-researched topics not only in behavioural economics but also in other disciplines such as in psychology, politics and sociology. The effects of communication as a means of establishing a common ground among all involved parties in the decision-making process are important to be understood. From a methodological perspective, communication is typically banned from laboratory experiments as participants make decisions being isolated and without communicating with each other. In cases where communication among participants is allowed, the main reason for this is that the researchers are interested in identifying the effects of communication on behaviour. At the same time, standard economic theory suggests that (non-binding) communication will not have any effect on behaviour, which makes the topic of studying communication in economics experiments of great interest. One crucial element when assessing the effects of communication on behaviour is the medium of communication. Experimental findings show that not all communication modes are effective in raising contribution levels. In the first subsection, our focus will be on which types of communication are (not) conducive to cooperation.
Next, we will offer evidence on whether endowment heterogeneity makes individuals more or less pro-social. The characteristic of introducing differences in endowments provided to subjects reflects real-life instances where income in the society is distributed unequally.
Index
- Michalis Drouvelis, University of Birmingham
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- 22 December 2023
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- 30 September 2021, pp 195-199
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Appendix A - Experimental instructions
- Michalis Drouvelis, University of Birmingham
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Summary
In this Appendix, we provide sample instructions about the key experimental games measuring aspects of social preferences as covered in the previous chapters of this book. Specifically, the instructions relate to ultimatum games (Section A.1), dictator games (Section A.2), trust games (Section A.3), simultaneous public good games (Section A.4), sequential public good games (Section A.5), public good games with punishment (Section A.6) and public good games with third-party punishment (Section A.7). For the public good game instructions (Sections A.4, A.5 and A.6), we also include instructions for belief elicitation which can be easily adapted and used for other experimental games.
The provided set of instructions can be a useful tool for instructors to run classroom experiments, students who may want to conduct their own experiments for their dissertations and/or assessed components in a behavioural economics module (e.g. group projects and presentations) and academics who would like to run relevant experiments for their research. The corresponding parameters specified (e.g. amount/endowment to be divided, group size, number of periods) can be straightforwardly adjusted depending on the nature of the experiment.
Instructions for the ultimatum game
Instructions for proposers
Welcome to this study of decision-making. The instructions are simple, and if you follow them carefully, you can earn a considerable amount of money. In this experiment, you have been assigned the role of “Participant A”. You have been randomly matched with another participant who will be in the role of “Participant B”. Your earnings will depend on your decisions as well as on the decisions of Participant B. At no point during the experiment, nor afterwards will you be informed about the identity of the other participants in your group and the other participants will never be informed about your identity.
You will be asked to propose a split of a total of 10 Pounds between yourself and Participant B. In particular, you will make an offer to Participant B that specifies how much of the 10 Pounds you will receive and how much of the 10 Pounds he/she will receive.
The amount that your offer specifies for yourself can be anything from 0 to 10 Pounds. Your earnings in the experiment will depend on whether or not Participant B accepts your offer. If he/she accepts your offer, both you and Participant B receive the amounts specified in your (accepted) offer
2 - Bargaining games
- Michalis Drouvelis, University of Birmingham
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Summary
Introduction
One of the most common aspects of economic and social life that people experience and engage in has to do with bargaining. Examples abound. Many professionals such as CEOs, consultants, brokers, political leaders and policy makers spent most of their career life negotiating with others, trying to determine the outcomes of bargaining processes that are likely to affect the lives of large groups. In various workplace environments, managers and labour unions bargain over terms and conditions of employment contracts or policies managing performance that may lead to promoting, demoting or even firing employees who underperform. In business settings, negotiations can take the form of complicated and endless discussions of delivering high-stake mergers and acquisitions among two or more firms or bargaining between two parties can be useful when establishing a partnership or making a big investment. In the real estate realm, homeowners and buyers often negotiate over the price of a house until a final deal is reached. And the list of bargaining examples can go on for ever, indicating how important bargaining is in our daily lives.
In some of these situations, the bargaining process reaches a point where one party has to make a final offer to the other party who can either take it or leave it. How individuals decide in this context is of crucial interest to understand. Are people motivated by pure self-interest trying to maximize their own earnings from the bargaining process or are they driven by fairness/equity or other pro-social concerns? One of the most well researched economic paradigms encapsulating the take-it-or-leave-it element of the bargaining process is the so-called “ultimatum game” inspired by Guth et al. (1982). In its original form, the ultimatum game consists of two players: a proposer and a receiver. The proposer is given a fixed endowment of money (say, £10) and proposes a split between him/herself and the responder. After observing the split, the responder decides whether to accept or reject this ultimatum offer. In case of acceptance, both parties receive the proposed split as made by the proposer. In case of rejection, both parties leave empty-handed.
Notes
- Michalis Drouvelis, University of Birmingham
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6 - Leadership
- Michalis Drouvelis, University of Birmingham
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Summary
Introduction
Leadership plays a key role characterizing many social and economic activities in our daily life. Yukl (2013: 18) refers to leadership as “a process whereby intentional influence is exerted over other people to guide, structure, and facilitate activities and relationships in a group or organization”. From a behavioural economics perspective, one critical dimension of leadership is its potential to influence and change others’ behaviour – this makes it a useful means that can be employed in order to motivate pro-sociality. In addition, leaders are thought of as individuals who put aside their own self-interest in order to serve the collective goals, irrespective of whether this may lead to monetary or non-monetary losses in terms of their own careers, reputation or social image. Our particular interest in this chapter is to understand whether and if so, how the power of leadership can induce cooperative behaviour in social dilemma games where there is a tension between personal interests and group benefits. Questions such as which sort of leadership strategies are more likely to resolve the trade-off between self-interest and group welfare, and which are those characteristics that make a good leader have captured the attention of behavioural economists (as well as other social scientists).
Guided by the well-documented evidence from public good games (see Chapter 4) where individuals’ contribution behaviour follows a decaying pattern, the literature has attempted to uncover mechanisms that can be used to eschew selfish behaviour. While leadership can take different forms, in behavioural economics, it has been typically studied as a sequential game whereby the leader in a group is the person who first decides how much to contribute. Following the leader's decision, the other members of the group (referred to as followers) then decide on their contributions. This sort of decision-making environment is known as “leading-by-example” (see Figure 6.1 for a graphical illustration of the sequential public good game).
So why is this paradigm an interesting setting? There are many examples in which the responsibility of making a decision falls on the shoulders of an individual who needs to set the example by deciding first.
References
- Michalis Drouvelis, University of Birmingham
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3 - Trust and gift exchange games
- Michalis Drouvelis, University of Birmingham
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- 22 December 2023
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Summary
Introduction
An important characteristic of our daily behaviour that determines aspects of economic and social interactions is trust. The presence of trust defines the behavioural content of a host of human relationships and has therefore attracted the interest of scholars across different disciplines such as economics, sociology, and political science, to name a few. There a number of definitions that have been put forward in the literature with regards to what trust captures. For example, Gambetta (2000) defines trust as a probability that an individual assigns to another individual performing a certain action. Looking at the sociological value of trust, Luhmann (1979) argues that trust operates in a way such that it reduces complexity in the society and recognizes that individuals’ decision to place trust on others depends on past experience of whether trust was successful (or not) but also on the associated risks related to future decisions. In his 2009 paper, Fehr offers a behavioural definition of trust – based on Coleman's (1990) explanation – according to which the trustor “trusts if she voluntarily places resources at the disposal of another party (the trustee) without any legal commitment from the latter” and points out that trusting someone comes “with an expectation that the act will pay off in terms of the investor's goals”. A key question is: how do we measure trust? Following the behavioural perspective of trust, experimental economists have measured trust using the simple framework put forward by Berg et al. (1995).
The structure of the trust game consists of a sequential game involving two players: the sender and the receiver. The sender (i.e. the first mover) has to decide how much of their experimental endowment – $10 in the Berg et al. (1995) design – to transfer to an anonymous partner, the receiver (i.e. the second mover). The amount of money that the sender transfers to the receiver is tripled by the experimenter. Following this, the receiver has to decide how much out of the tripled account to return to the sender. Any amount of money that the receiver does not transfer back is kept by the receiver.
Frontmatter
- Michalis Drouvelis, University of Birmingham
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Appendix B - Practical information
- Michalis Drouvelis, University of Birmingham
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Summary
Introduction
The aim of this Appendix is to provide useful information about the practical aspects of conducting a laboratory experiment. The scientific process of running an experiment requires that the researcher goes through a number of important steps until the final paper is written up. In general, these steps include: (1) identifying a research question (and its motivation/added value relative to existing knowledge); (2) setting up the design of the experiment (i.e. how the research question can be addressed?) and formulating hypotheses (which can be based on economic/psychological frameworks and/or past empirical evidence); (3) preparing the practical aspects of running the experiment; and (4) collecting the data and writing up the paper. Our main focus in this Appendix will be to highlight some of the key elements and steps upon which the researchers place emphasis when they are actually preparing to conduct their experiments. We will discuss, in turn, the following four aspects: subject pool, context (of the instructions), recruitment/programming practices when running a laboratory experiment and possible design aspects that need to be decided when an experiment is in its design phase.
Subject pool
A first choice that researchers need to make before running an experiment is what their sample will be. To a large extent, the answer to this depends on the nature of the research question that is at hand. Typically, the most commonly used subject pool in laboratory experiment consists of university students. There are several advantages for using students as subject pools – as opposed, for example, to representative samples or professionals – which can be summarised as follows (for a more elaborate discussion on this issue, see Frechette (2017)).
1. Opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of students is lower compared to other subject pools such as professionals who normally receive relatively higher wages. Recruiting professionals or representative samples from the population may increase the budget needed for conducting an experiment substantially which may come at the expense of collecting less data (having implications about the power of the data and the reliability of the conclusions drawn from the experiment).
9 - Cross-cultural experiments
- Michalis Drouvelis, University of Birmingham
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Summary
Introduction
A common characteristic of the experimental research discussed in previous chapters is that most studies examine human decision-making stemming from subjects who have been considered as being WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic). Relying on students who form the bulk of the database in experimental research provides useful insights of actual behaviour, but at the same time, only focusing on findings from this subpopulation may hide important patterns of economic behaviour which may be uncovered by extending the focus of experimental research and examining countries characterized by different cultural and societal traditions. A key question to address is whether human behaviour from WEIRD populations is representative to wider contexts and if so, what the underlying processes and motivational forces shaping behaviour in such populations are.
Behavioural scientists are therefore faced with a challenge calling for more experimentation that explores behaviour in less standard populations. This has recently led to a significant increase in the number of experimental studies gathering evidence comparing the motivational universality of WEIRD populations to broader subject samples. In this chapter, we will discuss various cross-cultural studies examining key aspects of social preferences such as fairness, trust, cooperation and negative reciprocity. Before we turn our attention to these studies, it is important to highlight that conducting cross-cultural research is a challenging task that behavioural scientists are confronted with. There are several issues that need to be taken care of in order to minimize potential differences in the experimental protocols, allowing to achieve the maximum possible level for the comparison of human behaviour across a diverse set of societies. The focus of our analysis is on five factors which we discuss below. These issues are also discussed in the cross-cultural experiments by Roth et al. (1991) and Herrmann et al. (2008) who conduct cross-cultural experiments.
Language effects
There is a substantial body of research offering evidence that framing of the decision-making problem does matter. Consequently, how the context in which subjects interact is described is a key issue for which experimenters should pay attention in cross-cultural studies.
8 - Public good games with sanctioning II
- Michalis Drouvelis, University of Birmingham
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- 22 December 2023
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Summary
Introduction
In the previous chapter, we discussed evidence about the importance of sanctioning as a mechanism that can overcome the breakdown of cooperation and sustain high contributions. In all these experiments, a common characteristic was that the rules of the games were (randomly) determined and imposed exogenously by the experimenter. This means that the institution (i.e. public good environment) that subjects face in the experiment was not the result of their choice, a design aspect that prevents us from understanding which institution subjects would prefer to select and how they would behave in a situation where subjects can make such a choice. Part of the focus of this chapter will be on subjects’ preferences over institutions, but also on how the endogenous selection of institutions influences the evolution of cooperation and how the endogenous vs the exogenous assignments to institutions compare with each other.
Most of the extant literature implements the endogenous assignment to institutions through the use of different voting rules (e.g., ballot voting or “voting with one's feet”) resembling the real-life democratic processes that are employed when individuals decide for the introduction of a new rule. The earlier relevant literature has primarily focused on the selection of environments that offer rewards and punishments which will also be our concern for the first half of this chapter. Following this evidence, subsequent experiments have examined how people vote for different aspects of the respective institutions such as whether contributions to the private or the public account are punished, who will get punished or what the maximum level of punishment will be, among others. Broadly speaking, the main focus of this literature is on individuals’ institutional preferences as measured by their voting decisions (i.e. do individuals prefer societies characterized by sanctioning and/or rewards?) and how such decisions affect outcomes (in terms of cooperative behaviour but also efficiency/earnings). These are important questions, helping us to gain a better understanding of the behavioural determinants of human cooperation and, given the complexity of the analysis of voting processes in real-life, the application of experimental methods appears suitable (allowing us to avoid potential identification issues that may be present in the field).
7 - Public good games with sanctioning I
- Michalis Drouvelis, University of Birmingham
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Summary
Introduction
Extensive evidence from public good game experiments (also presented in Chapters 4 and 5) provides robust evidence that average contributions decline over time. A natural question that has occupied the interest of behavioural economists is whether we can identify mechanisms that can overturn the decaying pattern. One of the key mechanisms that has been proposed is that of monetary sanctioning, a study which was pioneered by Fehr and Gachter (2000). A motivation for this mechanism stems from earlier findings in public good games showing that people have heterogeneous preferences in that some subjects are selfish and others are conditional cooperators. The lack of a tool that regulates self-interested behaviour makes conditional cooperators behave as if they are selfish since they understand that there exist free riders in the group who do not contribute to the public good. The result is that the interaction between selfish individual and conditional cooperators drives average contributions down. To encourage cooperative norms, Fehr and Gachter (2000) proposed a two-stage public good game, called the “public good game with punishment”. This is the main framework which Chapter 7 is based on.
The structure of the public good game with punishment is as follows. The first stage of this game is identical to a standard public good game where each member in a group is asked to decide how much to contribute to the public good. In the public good game with punishment, an extra phase is added where subjects are informed of the contribution profile of the other group members and has to decide whether to assign punishment (negative) points that have a monetary impact on their total payoff. In particular, the assignment of punishment points is costly both for the punisher and the punished group member. From a standard economic perspective, this implies that a subject, who is purely selfish and only cares about maximizing their own income, will refrain from assigning negative points (because their assignment is costly) in the second stage. As a result, a selfish individual will also contribute nothing to the public good in the first stage of the game.
Preface
- Michalis Drouvelis, University of Birmingham
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Summary
The present book offers an introduction in the experimental economics literature pertaining to aspects of individuals’ social preferences. In its nine chapters and two appendices, this book discusses some key experimental economics paradigms that behavioural scientists are frequently using in order to gain a better understanding of human behaviour. These paradigms consist of bargaining games, trust games, simultaneous public good games without and with punishment, and sequential public good games. The extant literature has produced a huge literature and has considerably advanced our knowledge. The aim of this book is not to present a comprehensive literature review of the existing social preferences experiments. Instead, we offer an accessible discussion of a selective part of the literature that can be used for a semester-long course in behavioural and experimental economics, with a focus on social preferences. The book is targeted at those who have little background in the field of experimental economics and the choice of the topics discussed reflects a bias towards my own research interests. However, it is hoped that the offered discussion presents a series of novel and influential experiments in the literature.
It is also important to underscore that the length of each chapter has been selected with the main principle being that the material presented should be no more than 20 pages, which seems to be a sensible length for students’ weekly workload. In parallel, it was aimed that for some important papers, the key aspects of the experimental design, hypotheses and results are presented. The primary objective was to make the content of the book friendly to students, keeping the language as simple as possible (unlike academic papers which may use more technical terms sometimes) and helping them absorb the key elements more easily. At the same time, some experiments which are discussed in less detail aim to give students a general idea of the corresponding literature. Providing all this level of detail (at least) for some of the papers comes at a cost of limiting the number of papers that can be discussed in a given chapter but on the other hand, this structure hopefully gives a clearer description of the key papers, compared to other behavioural economics textbooks which only focus on a brief discussion of the main findings of papers.
Contents
- Michalis Drouvelis, University of Birmingham
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4 - Public Good Games I
- Michalis Drouvelis, University of Birmingham
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Summary
Introduction
One of the most fundamental issues in the social and behavioural sciences is to understand whether and if so, under which conditions individuals are willing to cooperate in situations where personal interests are at odds with collective benefits. These situations reflect many naturally occurring environments including voting, tax compliance, corruption, teamwork, environmental protection. In all these cases, a rational individual who cares about maximizing their own payoff will always choose to free ride and rely on the contributions of others. In contrast, the society as a whole will benefit by having individuals cooperating and contributing towards the social good. A well-known example is the so-called “Tragedy of the Commons” (Hardin 1968). In this setting, each farmer caring only about their own welfare has an incentive to let as many cattle as possible use the commonly shared resource. However, this sort of behaviour comes at the expense of each other farmer as this would lead to overconsumption and eventually, the depletion of the common resource. If farmers, on the other hand, manage their common-pool resources in a sustainable manner, the resulting outcomes would be better for the welfare of the society. This conflict between personal and collective goals has attracted the interest of behavioural economists who have systematically explored the circumstances under which human cooperation can be achieved when strong financial incentives suggest the opposite.
The most commonly used framework that has been employed to understand human cooperation in a controlled laboratory context is the so-called “public good game”. The structure of this game is very simple: subjects randomly form a group of n members, each of whom is given a fixed endowment of E tokens. Their task is how to allocate their fixed endowment between their private account and a public account. Allocating tokens in the private account benefits only the group member, whereas allocating tokens in the public account benefits the other members of the group. In order to capture the tension between personal gains and collective goals, the parameters of the game are such that a rational and selfish group member will always free ride (i.e. contribute zero tokens to the public account).
1 - Introduction
- Michalis Drouvelis, University of Birmingham
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Summary
Homo economicus
Economists use theories and mathematical models to describe certain economic phenomena observed in real-life. Such theories can be parsimonious and make specific assumptions about how individuals should and do actually behave. One very popular such theory is the standard economic theory assuming that individuals are rational and selfish, caring only about maximizing their own material self-interest. In economics, rational individuals are those who have a consistent objective that they want to achieve.1 When individuals’ objective is to maximize their own material gains from undertaking a certain action, such decision-makers are often described as Homo economicus who are assumed to have strong computational abilities, allowing them to weight accurately the costs and benefits of a decision that monetarily benefits them the most. Standard economic theory has been the central framework of analysis for many decades. But why this theoretical model has attracted so much interest in economics?
The main reason is that standard economic theory is a very simple model of economic behaviour, abstracting from the complications of natural environments where different factors are operative at the same time. Building economic models is like drawing a map. In both cases, it is important to consider which details are relevant to be specified and which are less relevant: maps are drawn including those details that enable travellers to arrive at their destination and economic models are built including those details which are relevant in that they can make predictions that describe well observed behaviour.
To the extent that the selfishness assumption can describe observed behaviour accurately, standard economic theory does a good job. It is therefore natural to gain a better understanding about whether and if so, under which conditions selfishness is a good or bad assumption? The general answer is that it depends on what our research question is. Sometimes selfishness is a relevant assumption for people's behaviour; however, in many decision-making situations, it is not a good assumption and standard economic theory fails to explain economic behaviour. Take for example the case where we would like to understand why individuals engage in philanthropic activities or why they leave a tip in a restaurant or why they decide to volunteer in their free time?
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Social Preferences
- An Introduction to Behavioural Economics and Experimental Research
- Michalis Drouvelis
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- 22 December 2023
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- 30 September 2021
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This introduction to one of the key areas of behavioural economics Social Preferences explains in clear, nontechnical language how particular groups of experiments have been used by behavioural economists to shed light on the processes of economic decision making. These include bargaining games, trust games and public good games. The significance of determinants such as punishment, sanctioning, emotion, cooperation, reciprocity, leadership, framing and cross-cultural differences are demonstrated and explained, and students are provided with the understanding and resources needed to replicate the experiments themselves.
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