trust trustworthiness and information sharing in supply chains bridging china and the united states whether and how trust and trustworthiness differ between a collectivist society e g china and an individualistic one e g the united states generates much ongoing scientific debate and bears significant practical values for managing cross country transactions we experimentally investigate how supply chain members countries of origin china versus the united states affect trust trustworthiness and strategic information sharing behavior in a cross country supply chain we consider a two tier supply chain in which the upstream supplier solicits demand forecast information from the retailer to plan production but the retailer has an incentive to manipulate her forecast to ensure abundant supply the levels of trust and trustworthiness in the supply chain and supplier s capability to determine the optimal production quantity affect the efficacy of forecast sharing and the resulting profits we develop an experimental design to disentangle these three aspects and to allow for real time interactions b

conformity and the demand for environmental goods the existing literature on eco labeling and green consumerism has been framed within a classical market context where price and quality are the drivers of consumer choice however it seems possible that consumers are also concerned about the choices made by other consumers in fact it is unclear that people s consumption decisions are made independently of social context for instance under the desire to conform to certain social norms or in the presence of status concerns some individuals may be willing to pay a higher price premium for green products the more widespread green consumerism is in society we test this hypothesis using a choice experiment where the respondents were asked to choose among coffee products varying with respect to their share of ecological beans share of fair trade beans and price three treatments were used differing only in the information given about the choices made by other consumers we find different responses to the treatments across individuals and we can only confirm our hypothesis of conformity for women although men appear to have stronger preferences for ecological coffee than women have

behavioural development economics lessons from field labs in the developing world abstract explanations of poverty growth and development depend on the assumptions made about individual preferences and the willingness to engage in strategic behaviour economic experiments especially those conducted in the field have begun to paint a picture of economic agents in developing communities that is at variance with the traditional portrait we review this growing literature with an eye towards preference related experiments conducted in the field we also offer lessons on what development economists might learn from experiments we conclude by sharing our thoughts on how to conduct experiments in the field and then offer a few ideas for future research

corruption investments and contributions to public goods experimental evidence from rural liberia we analyze how corruption affects incentives to invest or contribute to public goods we obtain a proxy for corruption among liberian community leaders by keeping track of a flow of inputs associated with a development intervention measuring these inputs before and after giving them in custody to the chief we then use the gap between these measurements missing inputs to explain variation in investment behavior of villagers investment behavior is gauged with two simple artefactual field experiments our main results are that corruption i undermines incentives for voluntary contributions to local public goods and ii may reduce private investments of individuals subject to rent seeking by the chief in real life we also provide weaker evidence that the impact of corruption on investments and contributions to public goods is heterogeneous this impact may be gender specific and appears to vary with accessibility of communities

selfishness cooperation the evolutionary point of view and its implications for economics abstract the assumed selfishness of market actors could be considered in the context of two perspectives macroeconomic and microeconomic the first concerns the market mechanism as the most effective from the social well being or the wealth of a nation points of view the latter is based on the premises of the nature of human beings i have distinguished between two possible ways of understanding selfish forms of behaviour in the market as rational economic behaviour i e the most effective from the gains and losses point of view i e public interests in the works of a smith or as selfish from the psychological point of view this is mostly presented by j s mill s theory the first approach seems to be concerned with the creation of the most effective market mechanism from the state s point of view in the context of historical processes over 400 years cultural evolution has been promoting selfish behaviour for example it was widely presented in t hobbes works and then for over 200 years the theory of a smith has been supporting and moulding the institutional context of market and social behaviour thus positive economics describes the market created by the ideas of a neo classical paradigm which is based on the normative premises of a smith and j s mill moreover the virtual market behaviour described by effects f e veblen s effect and failures seems to be a manifestation of a discrepancy between market reality and the classical assumptions the social evolution of human beings has been advantageous to the human species moreover from the social point of view pro social behaviour is natural as well as desirable and it has been preferred by the cultural evolution competitiveness assumes that somebody has to lose because someone gains cooperation looks for gains for all the players the choice is political and not imposed by selfishness

functional unpleasantness the evolutionary logic of righteous resentment economics experiments and everyday experience cast doubt on the assumption that people are self interested in divide the dollar ultimatum games participants turn down offers that would make them objectively better off similarly drivers stuck in a traffic jam fume at cars cruising by on the shoulder many stuck drivers would punish the moving ones if they could even at some cost to themselves such strategies appear irrational because they make the punisher worse off than accepting the situation or offer we examine explanations for costly punishment and relax the presumption that punishers themselves prefer cooperation using evolutionary game theory to show how uncooperative punishers can support cooperation

the tragedy of the commons and socialization theory and policy we revisit the tragedy of the commons in an dynamic overlapping generations economy peopled of shepherds who decide how many sheep they let graze on a common parcel of land while relying on di fferent forms of rationality nash players pure or impure kantian players we examine the dynamics of heterogeneity and land congestion when the prevalance of those di fferent forms of rationality evolves over time follow ing a vertical oblique socialization process a la bisin and verdier 2001 we study the impacts of a quota and of a tax on the congestion of land and we show that introducing a quota may in some cases reduce the proportion of kantians pure and impure and worsen the tragedy of commons with respect to the laissez faire finally we examine whether a government should promote either a pure or an impure kantian morality by comparing the relative fi tness of pure impure kantians and their interactions with the congestion of land

long horizon mean reverting stock prices revisited this paper reexamines long horizon stock returns and finds that previous work overstates the evidence of mean reversion the overstatement is largely due to the implicit weighting of ordinary least squares tests which place more weight on the depression and world war ii observations which have both large error variances and stronger mean reverting tendencies additionally the reliance on asymptotic statistics and the improper focus on only the most negative estimates of mean reversion contribute to the overstatement using generalized least squares randomization tests on the 1926 to 1987 period the random walk cannot be rejected for value or equally weighted real returns at any of 10 return horizons or by joint tests over all 10 horizons simultaneously additionally the random walk cannot be rejected for the extended 1871 to 1987 period

behavioral economics for environmental policy abstract the predictions of widely prescribed global and country level environmental policies at present are based mainly on mainstream economic models which treat individual actors to be unboundedly rational in their decision making in recent years however behavioral and experimental economists have found that the individual actors in many circumstances act within a bounded rationality framework suggesting that predictions based on the unbounded rationality models would be less valid while some of mainstream economists have already started adopting the bounded rationality based models in their academic discourse many environmental economists seem to be reluctant to use these alternative models of rationality in their research and policy prescriptions this paper highlights the implications of using bounded rationality models in environmental research in general and policymaking in particular

carrot or stick the evolution of reciprocal preferences in a haystack model this paper studies the evolution and the co evolution of both characteristics of reciprocity the willingness to reward friendly behavior and the willingness to punish hostile behavior firstly both preferences for rewarding and preferences for punishing can survive in evolution provided individuals interact within separate groups this holds even with randomly formed groups and even when individual preferences are unobservable secondly preferences for rewarding survive only in coexistence with self interested preferences but preferences for punishing tend either to vanish or to dominate the population entirely finally the evolution of preferences for rewarding and the evolution of preferences for punishing influence each other decisively the existence of rewarders enhances the evolutionary success of punishers but punishers crowd out rewarders jel classification c72 d63 d64 d83

local rulemaking enforcement and compliance in state owned forest commons abstract the literature on rule compliance is divided between those urging greater autonomy for stakeholders in rulemaking processes and those arguing for increased enforcement however recent experimental evidence highlights the potential for synergies between participatory rulemaking and enforcement this paper therefore seeks to build upon these findings to explore the relationship between local rulemaking local monitoring and compliance in field settings the results which draw upon data about the behavior of 93 fuelwood user groups in state owned forest commons in asia africa and latin america suggest that the average group is more likely to comply with rules when local rulemaking is combined with local monitoring however in some contexts it appears that local rulemaking in particular and other institutional arrangements in general may yield similar results

from rational actor to efficient complexity manager exorcising the ghost of homo economicus with a unified synthesis of cognition research it is now commonplace to note that economics canonical model of humans as rational self interested utility maximizers homo economicus is both descriptively misleading and often insufficiently predictive however certain outdated assumptions tied to homo economicus persist often influencing discourse and research design even in sustainability oriented fields we argue this ghost of homo economicus endures because the diversity of findings that confound the canonical model has surfaced across multiple behavioral and cognitive sciences each with its own terminology and focus area as such a unified accessible synthesis of this new information has yet to emerge in this paper we review recent insights from across the behavioral and cognitive sciences and propose an efficient complexity manager ecm model homo efficens as the best synthesizing option the crux of this model is that our species works within biological limits to efficiently filter massive environmental complexity this is achieved largely through analogical or case based reasoning we explain this synthesized model using a series of accessible metaphors finally we speculate on how this model may enrich future sustainable development research insofar as it points to fruitful units of analysis can stimulate methodological innovation and provide a more explicit theoretical foundation for the field

the discourse of bounded rationality in academic and policy arenas pathologising the errant consumer this article draws on perspectives in philosophy and the sociology of knowledge to critically review the discourse of bounded rationality within contemporary economics it is argued that the discourse pathologises consumers who are susceptible to sub optimal market outcomes treating their behaviour as abnormal and treating individuals as deviants in need of rehabilitation it is claimed that by this means new forms of policy are legitimated specifically behavioural remedies designed to draw apparently errant consumers towards behaviour that conforms more closely to the standard that is neoclassical model of decision making it is argued that the upsurge of interest in these behavioural remedies distracts attention from facets of the individual s environment such as the characteristics of markets and the behaviour of firms and also the set of norms and beliefs underpinning the economic system copyright oxford university press

neighborhood effects and social behavior the case of irrigated and rainfed farmers in bohol the philippines artifactual field experiments spatial econometrics and household surveys are combined in a single study to investigate the neighborhood effects of social behaviors the dictator and public goods games are conducted among rice farmers in irrigated and non irrigated areas in the philippines we find the neighborhood effects but the magnitude and statistical significance of endogenous social effects vary with the irrigation availability type of social behavior and type of neighborhood altruistic and cooperative behaviors are significantly influenced by the behaviors of neighbors only in the irrigated area where social ties are strengthened through collective irrigation management through this effect irrigated farmers social behaviors become similar to those of one another neighborhood effects for cooperative behavior are stronger among farm plot neighbors than among residential neighbors which may reflect their interactions in irrigation management although non dynamic these findings are consistent with the theory of social norm evolution through common pool resource management

formalising economics social change values mechanics and mathematics in economic discourse the mathematisation and formalisation of economic science has been one of the most important features of the development of economic science in the latter part of the twentieth century what were the causes behind this ubiquitous mathematisation of economic science recent scholarship places excessive emphasis on the role and prestige of mathematics as a scientific tool in this paper we argue this is inadequate not least because it fails to account for the whole classical era when mathematical economists failed to have any impact explaining this failure is one of the main aims of this paper most accounts focus mostly on the intellectual factors involved failing to do justice to what amounts to a multifaceted and complicated phenomenon involving social economic political intellectual normative and institutional factors partly redressing the balance by bringing to the fore the various factors involved is the other prime aim of this paper

time varying competition normative models typically suggest that prices rise in periods of high demand and cost however in many markets prices fall when demand or costs rise this inconsistency occurs because the normative models assume that competitive intensity does not change with demand and cost conditions over time we therefore introduce the notion of time varying competition by suggesting that it is important not only to account for the direct effect of demand and cost on prices e g higher demand means higher prices but also the indirect effect of demand and cost changes on competition e g higher demand could cause more competition and hence lower prices we develop a general unified framework to empirically model the direct and indirect effects of demand and cost shifts on pricing in differentiated product markets our approach allows us to measure the indirect effect of multiple demand and cost drivers on competitive intensity and test predictions from alternative theories of repeated games the empirical application is to the u s photographic film industry where there are two main players kodak and fuji we find that the indirect effects are highly significant and comparable in magnitude to the direct effects competitive intensity is greater in periods of high demand and lower cost and is moderated by whether demand or costs are expected to grow or decline interestingly we find asymmetries in the competitive responses of kodak and fuji while kodak is sensitive to demand factors fuji is sensitive to costs our results suggest that market characteristics such as observability of competitor prices can be an important determinant of how competitive intensity is affected by demand and cost conditions

do you trust your brethren eliciting trust attitudes and trust behavior in a tanzanian congregation this paper describes one possible method for using subject pools other than undergraduate students we also report the results from an experiment in which 145 subjects belonging to a specific church in dar es salaam tanzania were exposed to a trust game and a standard set of attitudinal survey questions in order to study trust and trustworthiness two concepts that are likely to be at the core of the formation of social capital issues of method are discussed and the results are contrasted with those from a trust game with tanzanian undergraduate students as the subject pool c 2006 elsevier b v all rights reserved

culture and international business recent advances and their implications for future research the paper provides a state of the art review of several innovative advances in culture and international business ib to stimulate new avenues for future research we first review the issues surrounding cultural convergence and divergence and the processes underlying cultural changes we then examine novel constructs for characterizing cultures and how to enhance the precision of cultural models by pinpointing when cultural effects are important finally we examine the usefulness of experimental methods which are rarely used by ib researchers implications of these path breaking approaches for future research on culture and ib are discussed

on trust in honesty and volunteering among europeans cross country evidence on perceptions and behavior abstract we conduct an experimental study among european citizens regarding cross cultural perceptions related to trust in two dimensions volunteerism and honesty we use representative samples from five major economies of the euro area france germany italy the netherlands and spain we find that european citizens rely on nationality to infer behavior assessments of behavior show a north south pattern participants from northern countries are perceived to be more honest and to provide more effort in a volunteering game than participants from southern countries actual behavior is however not always in line with these assessments assessments of honesty show strong evidence of social projection participants expect other european citizens to be less honest if they are culturally closer to themselves assessments of volunteerism instead show that both northern and southern europeans expect higher performance in northern than in southern european countries

is hypothetical bias a universal phenomenon a multinational investigation 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

resource scarcity and antisocial behavior abstract this paper examines whether exposure to persistent resource scarcity on the commons affects pastoralists readiness to engage in antisocial behavior towards their fellow commons users the region under study is divided into two areas according to exogenous variations in biomass production stemming from geological peculiarities we conducted a joy of destruction game with pastoralists from both areas and provide evidence for a positive relationship between antisocial behavior and long term exposure to scarcity antisocial behavior among villagers occurs twice as often in an area where resources are scarcer and competitive pressure is higher our results remain robust to the inclusion of various controls including beliefs socio demographics absolute and relative income and within group inequality if one interprets decreasing another participant s payoff below one s own as a tendency towards conflict behavior our results suggest a higher risk of conflict among resource users in areas of greater scarcity

values and marginal preferences in international business in a recent paper in this journal maseland and van hoorn argued that values surveys tend to conflate values and marginal preferences this assertion has been challenged by brewer and venaik who claim that the wording of most survey items does not suggest that these elicit marginal preferences this commentary responds to their claim and restates our original argument we stress that the distinction between values and marginal preferences is a conceptual rather than a semantic issue conflation of the two is a problem of stated preferences methods in general regardless of question formats what is more we argue that support for the marginal preferences interpretation of values survey data does not come from the specific wording of questions used in surveys but from a growing number of paradoxical relations between values ratings and outcomes in values research implications are twofold first we argue that in order to measure values we need to look at alternatives to the stated preferences approach such as revealed preferences and experienced preferences of which the latter seems most promising second we find that values surveys eliciting marginal preferences are useful for understanding and predicting differences in behavior in a given context

how basic are behavioral biases evidence from capuchin monkey trading behavior behavioral economics has demonstrated systematic decision making biases in both lab and field data do these biases extend across contexts cultures or even species we investigate this question by introducing fiat currency and trade to a colony of capuchin monkeys and recovering their preferences over a range of goods and gambles we show that capuchins react rationally to both price and wealth shocks but display several hallmark biases when faced with gambles including reference dependence and loss aversion given our capuchins inexperience with money and trade these results suggest that loss aversion extends beyond humans and may be innate rather than learned

evolutionary origins of the endowment effect evidence from hunter gatherers the endowment effect the tendency to value possessions more than non possessions is a well known departure from rational choice and has been replicated in numerous settings we investigate the universality of the endowment effect its evolutionary signi cance and its dependence on environmental factors we experimentally test for the endowment effect in an isolated and evolutionarily relevant population of hunter gatherers the hadza bushmen of northern tanzania we nd that hadza living in isolated regions do not display the endowment effect while hadza living in a geographic region with increased exposure to modern society and markets do display the endowment effect jel c93 d12 o15 this paper uses a natural experiment in a hunter gatherer population to provide evidence on three questions the universality of a behavioral bias the endowment effect its dependence on cultural factors and its evolutionary signi cance systematic deviations from rational behavior have been extensively documented along with their importance for market outcomes yet evidence on the three questions above is sparse especially for biases in economic decisions first most experiments are conducted in industrialized societies and in particular on college campuses so biases could be the result of shared experiences as opposed to innate features of human behavior second cross cultural experiments typically compare very different groups making it hard to attribute differences in behavior to a speci c cultural factor due to omitted variable bias roth et al 1991 henrich et al 2001 2006 third while many contributions in economics have proposed evolutionary

irrigation as a historical determinant of social capital in india a large scale survey analysis summary it is widely understood that the same policy interventions can have different outcomes depending on the social structures they are implemented in much less clear though is what fundamentally determines communities social capital or the way individuals in a society interact this study analyzes how irrigation practices a key feature of agricultural organization in india affect different indicators of social capital to this end an informative household survey is combined with detailed historical agricultural statistics on irrigation and grain cultivation the depth of the datasets allows for fine grained analysis of effects of different kinds of irrigation on groups with varying degrees of involvement in the agricultural production process i show a significant negative influence of specific types of irrigation on the prevalence of conflict and an increased likelihood for attendance of public meetings yet it is not possible to establish a broad and consistent relationship between agricultural indicators and social capital which contradicts previous research furthermore specific groups with varying incentive structures based on their land holding status and agricultural engagement appear to be affected by different kinds of irrigation the results underline the need for a multidimensional analysis of both social capital and agricultural organization as well as their interaction i do not find evidence supporting the rice theory of culture

in search of homo economicus behavioral experiments in 15 small scale societies we can summarize our results as follows first the canonical model is not supported in any society studied second there is considerably more behavioral variability across groups than had been found in previous cross cultural research and the canonical model fails in a wider variety of ways than in previous experiments third group level differences in economic organization and the degree of market integration explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation the greater the level of cooperation in experimental games fourth individual level economic and demographic variables do not explain behavior either within or across groups fifth behavior in the experiments is generally consistent with economic patterns of everyday life in these societies

peer induced fairness in games people exhibit peer induced fairness concerns when they look to their peers as a reference to evaluate their endowments we analyze two independent ulti matum games played sequentially by a leader and two followers with peer induced fairness the second follower is averse to receiving less than the first follower using laboratory experimental data we estimate that peer induced fairness between followers is two times stronger than distributional fairness between leader and follower allowing for heterogeneity we find that 50 per cent of subjects are fairness minded we discuss how peer induced fairness might limit price discrimination account for low variability in ceo compensa tion and explain pattern bargaining

risk attitudes and economic well being in latin america abstract a common conjecture in both the theoretical and policy literatures on development is that people remain poor because they are too impatient and risk averse to accumulate the resources needed to improve their well being the empirical literature however suggests that this conjecture is far from proven we sample more than 3000 participants drawn representatively from six latin american cities and find little correlation between baseline risk aversion and well being measured as an index of eight outcomes we do however find that measures of ambiguity aversion loss aversion and the willingness to take advantage of a risk pooling scheme all correlate with well being participants who are ambiguity averse loss averse and who react conservatively in the risk pooling condition all have significantly lower scores on our well being index these results are robust to the inclusion of a variety of important controls like human capital accumulation and access to credit

free riding and ethnic heterogeneity abstract this paper provides a new explanation for lower levels of public good provision in heterogeneous societies compared to their homogeneous counterparts social sharing norms force rich individuals to share part of their income with their poor relatives but do not apply across different ethnic groups because there is a more extensive redistribution in more homogeneous societies the cost of contributing to the public good is lower the model predicts the level of public goods provision and welfare monotonically decreases with the number of different ethnic groups

social preferences in the lab a comparison of students and a representative population we report from a lab experiment conducted with a sample of participants that is nationally representative for the adult population in norway and two student samples economics students and non economics students the participants make choices both in a dictator game a non strategic environment and in a generalized trust game a strategic environment we find that the representative sample differs fundamentally from the student samples both in the relative importance assigned to different moral motives efficiency equity and reciprocity and in the level of selfish behavior it is also interesting to note that the gender effects observed in the student samples do not correspond to the gender effects observed in representative sample finally whereas economics students behave less pro socially than non economics students the two student groups are similar in the relative importance they assign to different moral motives

thanks but no thanks a new policy to reduce land conflict abstract land conflicts in developing countries are costly both directly and through increased land degradation an important policy goal is to create respect for borders this often involves mandatory expensive interventions we propose a new policy design which in theory promotes neighborly relations at low cost a salient feature is the option to by pass regulation through consensus the key idea combines the insight that social preferences transform social dilemmas into coordination problems with the logic of forward induction as a first low cost pass at empirical evaluation we conduct an experiment among farmers in the ethiopian highlands a region exhibiting features typical of countries where borders are often disputed

modelling the effectiveness of climate policies how important is loss aversion by consumers abstracts reliable decarbonisation policies can only be developed with a thorough understanding of how consumers choose between energy technologies current energy models assume optimal consumer decisions which may result in expectations of the effectiveness of climate policies that are far too optimistic prospect theory on the other hand aims to model real life choices based on empirical observations that losses have a relatively larger influence on decisions than gains relative to a reference point here we show for the first time how loss aversion can be included into a global energy model with high spatial resolution using heating technology uptake as a case study we simulate the future heating technology diffusion for 59 world regions covering the globe with and without the consideration of loss aversion we find that ignoring the implications of loss aversion overestimates the market uptake of renewables in individual countries as well as on the global level as a consequence loss aversion results in higher projected co2 emissions by households and the need for much stronger policy instruments for achieving decarbonisation targets in the case of residential heating a carbon tax of 200 tco2 is projected to reduce overall emission levels to a similar extent than a carbon tax of 100 tco2 without the consideration of loss aversion even for similar degrees of decarbonisation accounting for loss aversion implies substantial changes in the underlying technology composition technology choices become subject to a conservative shift towards low carbon technologies which are relatively less efficient but already more established in local markets

altruism evolution and welfare economics henrich clearly presents the convincing evidence that the evolution of prosocial preferences altruism and altruistic punishment is both theoretically possible and empirically present in human populations henrich convinces us using only the most restrictive arguments if one goes beyond the assumptions of one gene one trait or recognizes the existence of social cognition caporael 1997 the case for the existence of prosocial behavior is overwhelming furthermore while henrich is probably correct in saying that large scale social cooperation is unique to the human species mounting evidence suggests that prosocial behavior is also present in such diverse non human species as lions meerkats fire ants and arabian babblers clutton brock 2002 so why is the reaction against the notion of pure altruism so strong in both economics and biology a likely reason is that it goes against the dominant cultural belief in progress through competition among individuals both evolutionary biology and political economy matured in victorian england where darwin s careful and cautious argument for evolution by natural selection was recast as survival of the fittest a metaphor which fit the dog eat dog world of commercial society rugged individualism is reflected in the gene based reductionism of biology as well as the agent based reductionism of welfare economics bergh and van den gowdy 2003 in his contribution henrich establishes the theoretical basis for cultural group selection based on large scale cooperation he shows that the existence of prosocial behavior cannot be explained by individual based characteristic alone such as kin selection reciprocal altruism or costly signaling this does not contradict darwinian natural selection which can operate on any statistically reliable pattern patterns of culture may vary widely in human societies based on the different kinds of cultural transmission including conformist transmission a short cut to reliable information prestige based transmission punishment of non conformists and normative conformity by which people want their behavior to match that of the group the interplay between these kinds of cultural transmission and the in

when order affects performance culture behavioral spillovers and institutional path dependence evidence suggests that the cultural context influences the performance of laws policies and political institutions descriptive accounts reveal that outcomes and behaviors often depend on the array of historical institutions this article presents a multi institutional framework that can account for those findings through path dependent behavioral spillovers individuals learn equilibrium behaviors when interacting in a new institutional setting initially some individuals choose behaviors that align with their behaviors in similar extant institutions creating a cultural context that can lead to inefficient outcomes the article shows how avoiding path dependence requires sequencing or designing institutions to maintain behavioral diversity optimal sequencing thus requires positioning institutions with clear incentives early in the sequence as well as avoiding strong punishments that can stifle attempts to break established behavioral patterns

where do social preferences come from where do preferences for fairness come from we use a unique field setting to test for a spillover of sharing norms from the workplace to a laboratory experiment fishermen working in teams receive random income shocks catching fish that they must regularly divide among themselves we demonstrate a clear correlation between sharing norms in the field and sharing norms in the lab furthermore the spillover effect is stronger for fishermen who have been exposed to a sharing norm for longer suggesting that our findings are not driven by selection effects our results are consistent with the hypothesis that work environments shape social preferences

securing property rights a dilemma experiment in austria mexico mongolia south korea and the united states abstract secure property rights result from a combination of public enforcement private protective measures and voluntary norm compliance we conduct a laboratory experiment to study how culture interacts with institutions in shaping individuals behaviors and group outcomes in a property rights dilemma the experiment is conducted in five countries austria mexico mongolia south korea and the united states we find that the security of property varies with the experimentally available institutions and country level indicators such as trust and quality of government subjects from countries with higher levels of trust are more likely to abstain initially from theft devote more resources to production and support funding public protection of property through taxation our findings highlight the relevance of cultural and institutional factors and their interaction in addressing the collective action problem of safeguarding property rights

why did pre modern states adopt big god religions over the past two millennia successful pre modern states in eurasia adopted and cultivated big god religions that emphasize i the ruler s legitimacy as divinely ordained and ii a morality adapted for large scale societies that can have positive economic effects we make sense of that development by building on previous research that has conceptualized pre modern states as maximizing the ruler s profit we model the interaction of rulers and subjects who have both material and psychological payoffs the latter emanating from religious identity overall religion reduces the cost of controlling subjects through the threat of violence increases production increases tax revenue and reduces banditry a big god ruler who also is a believer has stronger incentives to invest in expanding the number of believers and the intensity of belief as well as investing in state capacity furthermore such investments often are complementary mutually reinforcing one another thus leading to an evolutionary advantage for rulers that adopted big god religions

explaining variation in broker strategies a lab in the field experiment in senegal the implications of clientelism for democratic accountability are mixed brokers not only help coordinate votes for collective gain but also exploit their position to advance personal interest i argue that brokers use distinct strategies persuasion reciprocation and punishment to motivate voters as a function of their local institutional context competitively selected brokers whose preferences are aligned with those of followers can rely more on persuasion than instrumental inducements economically autonomous brokers are more likely to rely on sanctions than reciprocity evidence to support both the proposed typology of broker strategies and their determinants is collected in senegal a clientelistic democracy where group level heterogeneity generates natural variation in broker types a coordination game played with real brokers illustrates that participants are less likely to sacrifice personal gain when brokers are competitively selected more likely when they most fear retribution qualitative da

free markets and fettered consumers are consumers sufficiently self interested and self reliant so that privatized markets deliver the efficiency and welfare gains they promise why are consumers uncomfortable in markets and in some case sufficiently opposed to market solutions to prevent their implementation what can be done to prepare consumers so that they function satisfactorily in markets and understand the advantages of market based resource allocation this paper examines the foundations of consumer behavior and attitudes in markets and proposes a program of scientific research to determine how consumers cope in privatized markets and the implications for market design of the limits of self reliance

ethnic diversity public spending and individual support for the welfare state a review of the empirical literature we review the empirical literature that studies the effect of ethnic diversity on public spending and on individual support for the welfare state the survey puts a particular focus on the fast growing literature that uses experiments to study the effects of ethnic diversity many of these studies have appeared since the pioneering survey by alesina and la ferrara and have not been covered by a survey before

common pool resources with free mobility i introduction to date most of the experimental research on common pool resources cpr has been concerned with the overexploitation problem within one community several studies as in casari and plott 2003 visser 2006 and fehr and gachter 2000 emphasize that mutual monitoring and sanctions against excessive use and free riding can be welfare improving in cpr and public good settings furthermore ostrom 1990 and others highlight the importance of clearly defined boundaries for successful self governance in the commons however in and out population migration may be a significant factor in resource use across communities examples include international fisheries or pastureland under extensive grazing the purpose of this study is to consider the effect of migratory pressure on such mobile commons in this article we relax the assumption of no entry and study how an agent s free mobility between communities affects resource use population migration is free in the tiebout 1956 sense we assume that agents mobility is costless our work differs from previous research in that it addresses the mobility issue by looking at multiple localities each with a cpr under either sanctions or open access regime we compare resource extraction behavior under different resource use regimes sanctions vs no sanctions using laboratory experiments conducted in two countries the united states and mongolia examples of commons with multiple locations are widespread in national and world economies extensive livestock production prevalent in mongolia kyrgyzstan niger and mali relies on low forage value grassland which requires movement of herders over large territories subsuming many localities similarly fisheries around international waters involve resource use problems across many localities or even countries for instance pink salmon in the north east pacific is harvested in canadian american and russian waters some localities may have regulations such as sanctions to promote the efficient use of the resource whereas others are still unregulated the alaskan salmon fisheries in chignik were governed at certain times by a cooperative fleet that shared catch equally among members and at other times by an independent fleet in such a way that unregulated fishermen were free to join cooperatives as studied in deacon parker and costello 2008 in new england users move among separately managed resources such as groundfish shellfish and baitfish within single political jurisdictions to reflect the high mobility aspect of such settings we extend the existing experimental laboratory research on cpr to allow for two communities in which citizens are free to choose the place to extract the resource in each community there is a territory with resources for harvesting activity we consider two possible community management regimes for each locality a unregulated community with no rules toward the grazing activity and b decentralized sanctioning mechanism as studied in casari and plot 2003 we consider this sanctioning system as an example of an institution that has a historical precedence and that has been shown to restore the efficiency of the common properties in closed communities the research questions are how does free mobility affect the performance of the sanctioning system if one locality is regulated and the other is not would the sanctioning institution withstand the migratory pressure from the unregulated locality how does the difference in a management regime affect agents decisions on which locality to join we address these questions in an experimental two community cpr framework where participants make decisions regarding the location to harvest and the harvesting level moreover we compare the setting with exogenously imposed institutions to a setting where the institutions in each locality are chosen by majority voting this comparison allows us to consider differences between representative democracy and direct democracy

causes of noncompliance with international law a field experiment on anonymous incorporation using two field experiments we probe the efficacy of international rules mandating that incorporation services establish their customers true identities the standards were designed to prevent anonymous shell corporations central to money laundering corruption and other crimes posing as consultants seeking confidential incorporation we randomly assigned six experimental conditions in emails varying information about monetary reward international and domestic law and customer risk to 1 793 incorporation services in 177 countries and 1 722 u s firms firms in tax havens obey the rules significantly more often than in oecd countries whereas services in poor nations sometimes prove more compliant than those in rich countries only the risk of terrorism and specter of the internal revenue service decrease offers for anonymous incorporation but they also lower compliance offers to pay a premium reduce compliance the risk of corruption decreases response rates but alarmingly also decreases compliance rates raising international law has no significant effect

a framework for mapping and comparing behavioural theories in models of social ecological systems formal models are commonly used in natural resource management nrm to study human environment interactions and inform policy making in the majority of applications human behaviour is represented by the rational actor model despite growing empirical evidence of its shortcomings in nrm contexts while the importance of accounting for the complexity of human behaviour is increasingly recognized its integration into formal models remains a major challenge the challenges are multiple i there exist many theories scattered across the social sciences ii most theories cover only a certain aspect of decision making iii they vary in their degree of formalization iv causal mechanisms are often not specified we provide a framework mohub modelling human behavior to facilitate a broader inclusion of theories on human decision making in formal nrm models it serves as a tool and common language to describe compare and communicate alternative theories in doing so we not only enhance understanding of commonalities and differences between theories but take a first step towards tackling the challenges mentioned above this approach may enable modellers to find and formalize relevant theories and be more explicit and inclusive about theories of human decision making in the analysis of social ecological systems

adjusting for cultural differences in international benefit transfer values for non market goods can be expected to be sensitive to variations in the cultural contexts of beneficiaries however little progress has been made to date in adapting benefit transfer bt procedures for cultural variations using information from a study that ranked 62 societies with respect to nine attributes of their cultures we develop an index that is then used to re weight multiple coastal ecosystem service value estimates we examine whether these culturally adjusted bt estimates are statistically different than simply transferring the income adjusted mean transfer estimates for each coastal ecosystem service from international study sites to the policy site we find that once differences in income levels have been accounted for the differences in cultural dimensions between study and policy sites actually have little impact on the magnitude of our transfer estimates this is not a surprising result given that the majority of the study site estimates are derived from countries that share many ethnic linguistic and other cultural similarities to the policy site however benefit adjustments based on cultural factors could have a much higher impacts in settings different to that investigated here

cross racial envy and underinvestment in south african partnerships trust games are employed to investigate the effect of heterogeneity in income and 5 race on cooperation in south africa the amount of socio economic information available to the subjects about their counterparts is varied no significant behavioural differences are observed when no such information is provided however when the information is available it significantly affects individual trust behaviour the low income subjects from both racial groups invest significantly less 10 in partnerships with the high income subjects of the other racial group than in any other partnership we attribute this behaviour to cross racial envy which on aggregate may lead to substantial efficiency losses

a road to trust the authors explore the relationship between transaction costs and generalized trust using panel data from 2 100 households in 135 rural communities of the philippines the paper shows that where transaction costs are reduced proxied by road construction there is an increase in generalized trust consistent with the argument that generalized trust is built through repeated interactions the authors find that the individuals most likely to engage in exchange exhibit an increase in trust after road construction these results suggest that rather than being an input to economic growth trust might be a product of reduced transaction costs which also favors growth

quantal response equilibrium models of the ultimatum bargaining game abstract this paper investigates the implications of quantal response equilibrium qre models mckelvey and palfrey 1995 games econ behav 10 6 38 1998 exper econ 1 9 41 in the ultimatum bargaining game it is shown that in a normal form qre nqre each bargainer s decision depends critically on the anticipated behavior of the other and there is a nqre in which the proposer makes any offer between zero and equal split as a strict best response the application of nqre to the experimental data slonim and roth 1998 econometrica 66 569 596 suggests that the history dependence observed in the experiment is a result of the strategic interactions between bargainers

is competition good for trust cross country evidence using micro data abstract this paper empirically analyzes implications of market competition for generalized trust of about 80 000 individuals in about 60 countries we find that competition amplifies the trust generating effect of market integration for highly integrated individuals

how psychological should economic and marketing models be abstract the authors discuss the potential of making the recently developed behavioral economics models even more psychological by 1 increasing their context specificity 2 allowing different people to have different model parameters and 3 capturing the underlying psychological processes more explicitly they show that some of these models already make room for understanding context specificity and heterogeneity and they discuss new ways to enrich the models along those two dimensions the task of adding process details is more challenging in simple mathematical forms because these models must serve as building blocks for aggregate market models

an experimental study on the relevance and scope of nationality as a coordination device in a period marked by extensive cross national interactions nationality may present an important focal point that individuals coordinate on this study uses an experimental approach to study whether nationality serves as a coordination device we let subjects from japan korea and china play coordination games in which we vary information about their partner the results show that nationality serves as a coordination device if common nationality is the only piece of information available to the subjects the strength of this device is nationality dependent and diminishes when participants are provided with additional information about their partner we also find that subjects are likely to coordinate on the pareto dominant equilibrium at about the same rate if the partner has a different nationality than if nationality is unknown jel c91 c92 z1 z13

public goods provision and redistributive taxation abstract this paper studies the relationship between redistributive taxation and tax deductible charitable contributions redistribution has two opposite effects on voluntary giving the price of charitable giving decreases with the degree of redistribution and this has a positive effect on the total amount of giving substitution effect however redistribution leads to lower consumption for the contributors and therefore has a negative effect on contributions to the charity income effect the theoretical model developed in this paper demonstrates that under a general class of utility functions the substitution effect dominates the income effect hence charitable giving increases with the tax rate in purely egalitarian societies the public good is provided efficiently and the total welfare is maximized independent of the ex ante income inequality however the positive impact of taxation on charitable giving and welfare may disappear if individuals generate their income levels in anticipation of taxation and redistribution does not take into account the cost of effort

gender differences in risk behavior an analysis of asset allocation decisions in ghana abstract within a developing country context little is known about gender differences in risk preferences as reflected in asset allocation decisions much of the empirical literature within development studies on risk and investment in assets centers on risk coping and risk management strategies of households with some exceptions this literature primarily focuses on household and household level outcomes previous experimental studies have explored gender differences in risk preferences in developing countries with inconclusive results using unique national representative sex disaggregated data with self reported asset ownership and wealth information of individuals within households in ghana from a multi country project the gender asset gap project this paper explores men and women s risk preferences as reflected in asset allocation decisions through a decomposition method typically used to explore gender differences in wage employment the study finds that although women hold significantly fewer risky assets than men in absolute terms and as a proportion of their wealth in the sample men and women do not have systematically different risk preferences the results in this paper differ from the results in many empirical studies in developed countries where women are often found to be more risk averse than men as the first study to look at gender differences in risk aversion in terms of asset allocation with in the developing country context the results from this study provide evidence that gender differences in risk attitudes may vary by cultural context as the growing experimental literature in developing countries suggests