Research evaluation is praised as the symbol of modern quality management. We claim firstly, performance evaluations in research have higher costs than normally assumed, because the evaluated persons and institutions systematically change their behavior andndevelop counter strategies. Moreover, intrinsic work motivation is crowded out and undesired lock-in effects take place. Secondly, the benefits of performance evaluations are questionable.nEvaluations provide too little information relevant for decision-making. In addition, they losenimportance due to new forms of scientific cooperation on the internet. Thirdly, there existnsuperior alternatives. They consist in careful selection and supportive process coaching – and then leave individuals and research institutions to direct themselves.
In many countries, TV viewers have access to more and more TVnchannels. We study whether people can cope with this and watch the amount of TVnthey find optimal for themselves or whether they are prone to over-consumption. Wenfind that heavy TV viewers do not benefit, but instead report lower life satisfactionnwhen exposed to more TV channels. This finding runs counter to the standardneconomic prediction that a larger choice set does not make people worse off. Itnsuggests that an identifiable group of persons experience a self-control problemnwhen it comes to TV viewing.
Engelmann and Strobel (AER 2004) question the relevance of inequity aversionnin simple dictator game experiments claiming that a combination of a preference fornefficiency and a Rawlsian motive for helping the least well-off is more important thanninequity aversion. We show that these results are partly based on a strong subject poolneffect. The participants of the E&S experiments were undergraduate students of economicsnand business administration who self-selected into their field of study (economics) andnlearned in the first semester that efficiency is desirable. We show that for non-economistsnthe preference for efficiency is much less pronounced. We also find a non-negligiblengender effect indicating that women are more egalitarian than men. However, perhapsnsurprisingly, the dominance of equality over efficiency is unrelated to political attitudes.
Centralized sanctioning institutions are of utmost importance for overcomingnfree-riding tendencies and enforcing outcomes that maximize group welfare in socialndilemma situations. However, little is known about how such institutions come intonexistence. In this paper we investigate, both theoretically and experimentally, thenendogenous formation of institutions in a public goods game. Our theoretical analysisnshows that players may form sanctioning institutions in equilibrium, includingnthose where institutions govern only a subset of players. The experiment confirmsnthat institutions are formed frequently as well as that institution formation has anpositive impact on cooperation rates and group welfare. However, the data clearlynreveal that players are unwilling to implement institutions in which some playersnhave the opportunity to free ride. In sum, our results show that individuals arenwilling and able to create sanctioning institutions, but that the institution formationnprocess is guided by behavioral principles not taken into account by standard theory.
The aim of this paper is to study whether schooling choices are affected by social interactions. Such social interactions may be important because children enjoy spending time with other children or parents learn from other parents about the ability of their children. Identificationnis based on a randomized intervention that grants a cash subsidy encouraging schoolnattendance among a sub-group of eligible children within small rural villages in Mexico. Results indicate that (i) the eligible children tend to attend school more frequently, (ii) but also the ineligible children acquire more schooling when the subsidy is introduced in their local village, (iii) social interactions are economically important, and (iv) they may arise due to changes innparents’ perception of their children’s ability.
Many countries are forging ahead with convenient balloting methods, in particular electronic and postal voting, in order to re-engage voters. In this paper, we test whether thencost reductions with postal voting increase turnout. The empirical analysis is based on annewly collected data set on the introduction of postal voting in Swiss cantons. We take advantage of the unique fact that voting by mail was introduced at different times across cantons. This allows identifying the impact of postal voting on turnout, independent of time,nissue and canton specific effects. The estimated average effect on turnout is roughly 4.1npercentage points for an average turnout of 43 percent between 1970 and 2005.
This paper studies the theoretical properties of a channel system of interestratencontrol in a dynamic general equilibrium model. Agents are subject to liquidity shocks which can be partially insured in a secured money market, ornat a standing facility operated by the central bank. We show that it is optimal to have a strictly positive interest rate corridor and that a shift of the corridor affects the money market rate one for one. Moreover, the central bank canntighten its policy without changing its policy rate by simply increasing the corridor symmetrically around the policy rate.
This paper studies a program that extends the maximum duration of unemployment benefits from 30 weeks to 209 weeks. Interestingly, this program is targeted to individuals aged 50nyears or older, living in certain eligible regions in Austria. In the evaluation, I use sharp discontinuities in treatment assignment at age 50 and at the border between eligible regions and control regions to identify the effect of extended benefits on unemployment duration. Resultsnindicate that the duration of job search is prolonged by at least .09 weeks per additional week of benefits among men, whereas unemployment duration increases by at least .32 weeks per additional week of benefits among women. The salient differences between men and women are consistent with the lower minimum age for early retirement applying to women.
This paper explicitly introduces norms in games, assuming that they shape (some) players’ utility and beliefs. People feel badly when they deviate from anbinding norm, and the less other players deviate, the more badly they feel.nFurther, people anger at transgressors and get pleasure from punishing them. Inthen study how social norms and emotions affect cooperation, coordination, and punishment in a variety of games. The model is consistent with abundantnexperimental evidence that alternative models of social preferences cannotnexplain.
In the television show Affari Tuoi an individual faces a sequence of binary choicesnbetween a risky lottery with equiprobable prizes of up to half a million euros and anmonetary amount for certain. The decisions of 114 show participants are used to test the predictions of ten decision theories: risk neutrality, expected utility theory, fanning-out hypothesis (weighted utility theory, transitive skew-symmetric bilinear utility theory), (cumulative) prospect theory, regret theory, rank-dependent expected utility theory, Yaari’s dual model, prospective reference theory and disappointment aversion theory.nAssumptions of risk neutrality and loss aversion are clearly violated, respectively, byn55% and 46% of all contestants. There appears to be no evidence of nonlinear probabilitynweighting or disappointment aversion. Observed decisions are generally consistent withnthe assumption of regret aversion and there is strong evidence for the fanning-outnhypothesis. Nevertheless, we find no behavioral patterns that cannot be reconciled withinnthe expected utility framework (or prospective reference theory that gives identicalnpredictions).
