Results 1 - 10
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49
Testing Guilt Aversion
- Games and Economic Behavior
, 2010
"... Guilt averse individuals experience a utility loss if they believe they let someone down. In particular, generosity depends on what the donor believes that the recipient expects to receive. In experimental work, several authors have identified a positive correlation between such second-order donor b ..."
Abstract
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Cited by 24 (3 self)
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Guilt averse individuals experience a utility loss if they believe they let someone down. In particular, generosity depends on what the donor believes that the recipient expects to receive. In experimental work, several authors have identified a positive correlation between such second-order donor beliefs and generous behavior, as predicted by the guilt aversion hypothesis. However, the correlation could alternatively be due to a “false consensus effect,” i.e., the tendency of people to believe others to think like themselves. In order to test the guilt aversion hypothesis more rigorously, we conduct three separate experiments: a dictator game experiment, a complete information trust game experiment, and a hidden action trust game experiment. In the experiments we inform donors about the beliefs of their respective recipients, while eliciting these beliefs so as to maximize recipient honesty. The correlation between generous behavior and donors ’ second-order beliefs is close to zero in all three
Fairness and Desert in Tournaments
, 2009
"... We model the behavior of agents who care about receiving what they feel they deserve in a two-player rank-order tournament. Perceived entitlements are sensitive to how hard an agent has worked relative to her rival, and agents are loss averse around their meritocratically determined endogenous refer ..."
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Cited by 12 (1 self)
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We model the behavior of agents who care about receiving what they feel they deserve in a two-player rank-order tournament. Perceived entitlements are sensitive to how hard an agent has worked relative to her rival, and agents are loss averse around their meritocratically determined endogenous reference points. In a fair tournament sufficiently large desert concerns drive identical agents to push their effort levels apart in order to end up closer to their reference points on average. In an unfair tournament, where one agent is advantaged, the equilibrium is symmetric in the absence of desert, but asymmetric in the presence of desert. We find that desert concerns can undermine the standard conclusion that competition for a fixed supply of status is socially wasteful and explain why, when the distribution of output noise is fat-tailed, an employer might use a rank-order incentive scheme.
Trust and Trustworthiness in Networked Exchange
- Games and Economic Behavior
, 2011
"... exchange ..."
in press. Great expectations: neural computations underlying the use of social norms in decision-making
- Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci
"... Social expectations play a critical role in everyday decision-making. However, their precise neuro-computational role in the decision process remains unknown. Here we adopt a decision neuroscience framework by combining methods and theories from psychology, economics and neuroscience to outline a n ..."
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Cited by 4 (0 self)
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Social expectations play a critical role in everyday decision-making. However, their precise neuro-computational role in the decision process remains unknown. Here we adopt a decision neuroscience framework by combining methods and theories from psychology, economics and neuroscience to outline a novel, expectation-based, computational model of social preferences. Results demonstrate that this model outperforms the standard inequity-aversion model in explaining decision behavior in a social interactive bargaining task. This is supported by fMRI findings showing that the tracking of social expectation violations is processed by anterior cingulate cortex, extending previous computational conceptualizations of this region to the social domain. This study demonstrates the usefulness of this interdisciplinary approach in better characterizing the psychological processes that underlie social interactive decision-making.
2014): “Mechanism Design and Intentions
"... We introduce intention-based social preferences into a Bayesian mechanism design frame-work. We first show that, under common knowledge of social preferences, any tension between material efficiency, incentive compatibility, and voluntary participation can be re-solved. Hence, famous impossibility r ..."
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Cited by 3 (0 self)
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We introduce intention-based social preferences into a Bayesian mechanism design frame-work. We first show that, under common knowledge of social preferences, any tension between material efficiency, incentive compatibility, and voluntary participation can be re-solved. Hence, famous impossibility results such as the one by Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983) are turned into possibility results. Second, we provide a systematic account of the welfare implications of kindness sensations. Finally, we turn to an environment without com-mon knowledge of social preferences and introduce the notion of a psychologically robust mechanism. Such a mechanism can be implemented without information about the type or the intensity of social preferences. We show that the mechanisms which have been the focus of the conventional mechanism design literature can be modified to achieve psychological robustness.
Relevance in Cooperation and Conflict
, 2009
"... ∗ Author names appear in alphabetical order. This paper was discussed at the Michigan ‘Conversational Implicatures ’ workshop in 2008. We would like to thank Zoltan Szabo, Rich Thomason and an anonymous reviewer for their critical comments on an earlier version this paper, and the other participants ..."
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Cited by 2 (0 self)
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∗ Author names appear in alphabetical order. This paper was discussed at the Michigan ‘Conversational Implicatures ’ workshop in 2008. We would like to thank Zoltan Szabo, Rich Thomason and an anonymous reviewer for their critical comments on an earlier version this paper, and the other participants of the workshop for further remarks. Furthermore, we would like to thank Sven Lauer and Chris Potts for discussion, and Ruth Kempson, Greg Restall and John Woods for The enterprise of Gricean pragmatics can be summarised as exploring the inferences (beyond the semantic content of an utterance) licensed by the assumption that a speaker intends to contribute cooperatively to some shared conversational end, and the extent to which these inferences match those
Are Benevolent Dictators Altruistic in Groups? A Within-Subject Design
, 2010
"... We use a within-subject experimental design to investigate whether systematic relationships exist across distinct features of individual preferences: altruism in a two-person context, risk aversion in monetary outcomes, and social preferences in a group context. We find that altruism is related to ..."
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Cited by 1 (0 self)
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We use a within-subject experimental design to investigate whether systematic relationships exist across distinct features of individual preferences: altruism in a two-person context, risk aversion in monetary outcomes, and social preferences in a group context. We find that altruism is related to demographic variables, including years of education, gender, and age. Perhaps most importantly, self allocation in a two-person dictator game is related to social preferences in a group context. Participants who are more generous in a dictator game are more likely to vote against their self-interest in a group tax redistribution game which we interpret to be an expression of social preferences.
Language-based games
- In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge
, 2013
"... ABSTRACT We introduce language-based games, a generalization of psychological games [6] that can also capture referencedependent preferences ..."
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Cited by 1 (1 self)
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ABSTRACT We introduce language-based games, a generalization of psychological games [6] that can also capture referencedependent preferences
Sorting with shame in the laboratory
- In: Proceedings of the Behavioral and Quantitative Game Theory: Conference on Future Directions. BQGT ’10. ACM
, 2010
"... Trust is indispensable to
duciary
elds (e.g., credit rating), where experts exercise wide discretion on behalf others. Can the shame from a scandal sort trustworthy people out of a
duciary
eld? I tested for the possibility in a charitable contribution game where subjects could be "ungenerou ..."
Abstract
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Cited by 1 (0 self)
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Trust is indispensable to
duciary
elds (e.g., credit rating), where experts exercise wide discretion on behalf others. Can the shame from a scandal sort trustworthy people out of a
duciary
eld? I tested for the possibility in a charitable contribution game where subjects could be "ungenerous " when unobserved. After establishing that "generosity " required a contribution of more than $6, subjects were given the choice of contributing either $5 publicly or $0-$10 privately. 20/22 control subjects chose to contribute privately less than $2. 10/26 treatment subjects, after being told the prediction that they were unlikely to contribute more than $2, if they contributed privately, contributed $5 publicly. This suggests that the mere belief that a subject would exploit the greater discretion and unobservability of a
duciary-like position can deter entry into such a position. Thus, scandals that create such a belief could repel shame-sensitive people from that
eld possibly to the detriment of the
eld and the economy as a whole.
