"Typically, laboratory experiments suffer from homogeneous subject pools and self-selection biases. The usefulness of survey data is limited by measurement error and by the questionability of their behavioral relevance. Here we present a method integrating interactive experiments and representative surveys thereby overcoming crucial weaknesses of both approaches. One of the major advantages of our approach is that it allows for the integration of experiments, which require interaction among the participants, with a survey of non-interacting respondents in a smooth and inexpensive way. We illustrate the power of our approach with the analysis of trust and trustworthiness in Germany by combining representative survey data with representative behavioral data from a social dilemma experiment. We identify which survey questions intended to elicit people’s trust correlate well with behaviorally exhibited trust in the experiment. People above the age of 65, highly skilled workersnand people living in bigger households exhibit less trusting behavior. Foreign citizens, Catholics andnpeople favoring the Social Democratic Party or the Christian Democratic Party exhibit more trust.nPeople above the age of 65 and those in good health behave more trustworthy or more altruistically,nrespectively. People below the age of 35, the unemployed and people who say they are in favor ofnnone of the political parties behave less trustworthy or less altruistically, respectively."
In recent years a large number of experimental studies have documented the existence of strong reciprocity among humans. Strong reciprocity means that people willingly repay gifts and punish the violation of cooperation and fairness norms even in anonymous one-shot encounters with genetically experimental evidence suggesting that ultimate evolutionary explanations of strong reciprocity. can rationalize strong reciprocity only if it is viewed as maladaptive behavior whereas the evidence suggests that it is an adaptive trait. Thus, we conclude that alternative evolutionary approaches are needed to provide ultimate accounts of strong reciprocity.
Based on an experimental analysis of a simple monetary economy we argue that a monetarynsystem is more stable than one would expect from individual rationality. We show thatnpositive reciprocity stabilizes the monetary system, provided every participant considers thenfeedbacks of his choice to the stationary equilibrium. If however the participants do not playnstationary strategies and some participants notoriously refuse to accept money then due tonnegative reciprocity their behavior will eventually induce a break down of the monetarynsystem.
Deterrence has been a crucial element in fighting terrorism, both in actual politics and rational choice analyses of terrorism. But there are superior strategies to deterrence. One is to make terrorist attacks less attractive. Another to raise the opportunity cost – rather than the material cost – to terrorists. These alternative strategies effectively dissuade potential terrorists. The strategies suggested here build on the “benevolence” system and tend to produce a positive sum game among the interacting parties. In contrast, the deterrence system is based on “threats” and tends to produce a negative sum game interaction.
Present anti-terrorist policy concentrates almost exclusively on deterrence. It seeks to fend off terrorism by raising the cost of undertaking terrorist acts. This paper argues that deterrence policy is less effective than generally thoughtnand induces in some cases even more terrorism. This is, in particular, the case if deterrence policy induces a centralisation of decision-making in the polity and economy. Therefore, an effective anti-terrorist policy should focus more on reducing the expected benefits of terrorist acts to prospective terrorists. Such a policy is based on strengthening rather than weakening decentralised decision-making.
We examine experimentally how Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) respond to incentives and how they provide incentives in situations requiring trust and trustworthiness. As a control we compare the behavior of CEOs with the behavior of students. We find that CEOs are consider-ably more trusting and exhibit more trustworthiness than students-thus reaching substantially higher efficiency levels than students. Moreover, we find that, for CEOs as well as for students, incentives based on explicit threats to penalize shirking backfire by inducing less trustworthy behavior-giving rise to hidden costs of incentives. However, the availability of penalizing incentives also creates hidden returns: if a principal expresses trust by voluntarily refraining from implementing the punishment threat, the agent exhibits significantly more trustworthiness than if the punishment threat is not available. Thus trust seems to reinforce trustworthy behav-ior. Overall, trustworthiness is highest if the threat to punish is available but not used, while it is lowest if the threat to punish is used. Paradoxically, however, most CEOs and students use the punishment threat, although CEOs use it significantly less.
We study indirect reciprocity and strategic reputation building in an experimental helping game. At any time only half of the subjects can build a reputation. This allows us to study both pure indirect reciprocity that is not contaminated by strategic reputation building and the impact of incentives for strategic reputation building on the helping rate. We find that while pure indirect reciprocity appears to be important, the helping choice seems to be influenced at least as much by strategic considerations. Strategic do better than non-strategic players and non-reciprocal do better than reciprocal players, casting doubt on previously proposed evolutionary explanations for indirect reciprocity.
In this paper, we suggest a novel approach to program evaluation that allows identification of the causal effect of a training program on the likelihood of being invited to a job interview under weak assumptions. The idea is to measure the program-effects by pre- and post-treatment data that are very close in time for the same individual. Our approach provides useful information on both, average effects of the program as well as information on the effects of the program for each individual. Evidence on individual treatment effects is helpful as it can be used to improve the targeting of programs.
The evidence from many experiments suggests that people are heterogeneous with regard to their abilities to make rational, forward looking, decisions. This raises the question when the rational types are decisive for aggregate outcomes and when the boundedly rational types shape aggregate results. We examine this question in the context of a long-standing and important economic problem - the adjustment of nominal prices after an anticipated money shock. Our experiments show that when agents' actions are strategic substitutes adjustment to the new equilibrium is extremely quick whereas under strategic complementarity adjustment lasts very long and is associated with relatively large real effects. This adjustment difference occurs because price expectations are very flexible under substitutability and very sticky under complementarity. Our results suggest that strategic complementarity does not only provide incentives for the rational types to partly mimic the behavior of the boundedly rational types butnit also renders people less rational and forward looking. In addition, underncomplementarity people attribute less rationality to the other players.
People not only care about outcomes, they also value the procedures which lead to the outcomes. Procedural utility is a potentially important source of human well-being. This paper aims at introducing the concept of procedural utility into economics, and argues that it should be incorporated more widely into economic theory and empirical research. Three building blocks of a concept of procedural utility are outlined and it is suggested how procedural utility can be fruitfully integrated. Evidence from a broad range of social sciences is reviewed in order to show that procedural utility is a relevant concept for economics.
