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on Evolutionary Economics |
| By: | Dorian Jullien (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, CNRS, Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne, Paris, France); Alexandre Truc (Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS, GREDEG, France) |
| Abstract: | Existing histories of behavioral and experimental economics (BE-XP) are mostly focused on the intellectual and institutional developments of these approaches in the United States of America - and to a lesser extent in Germany. While a seminal contribution to these approaches was produced in the early 1950s in France by Maurice Allais, the literature is rather silent on how BE-XP developed subsequently in France. We propose to fill this gap by comparing the history of BE-XP in France to international trends previously identified in the literature. We show that after an ambivalent influence of the work of Allais (1953) on BE-XP in France during the 1980s, that influence rapidly faded. BE-XP in France then largely follows international trends. We nevertheless identify some heterogeneity across the French territory and the development of at least two national specificities on the measurement of utility and the modeling of social preferences. |
| Keywords: | Behavioral economics, Experimental economics, History of economics |
| JEL: | B21 B40 |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gre:wpaper:2024-23 |
| By: | Nicolas Jacquemet (PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Stéphane Luchini; Jason Shogren; Adam Zylbersztejn |
| Abstract: | Under incomplete contracts, the mutual belief in reciprocity facilitates how traders create value through economic exchange. Creating such beliefs among strangers can be challenging even when they are allowed to communicate, because communication is cheap. In this paper, we first extend the literature showing that a truth-telling oath increases honesty to a sequential trust game with pre-play, fixed-form, and cheap-talk communication. Our results confirm that the oath creates more trust and cooperative behavior thanks to an improvement in communication; but we also show that the oath induces selection into communication -it makes people more wary of using communication, precisely because communication speaks louder under oath. We next designed additional treatments featuring mild and deterrent fines for deception to measure the monetary equivalent of the non-monetary incentives implemented by a truth-telling oath. We find that the oath is behaviorally equivalent to mild fines. The deterrent fine induces the highest level of cooperation. Altogether, these results confirm that allowing for interactions under oath within a trust game with communication creates significantly more economic value than the identical exchange institutions without the oath. |
| Keywords: | Trust game, cooperation, communication, commitment, deception, fine, oath |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:cesptp:halshs-04722343 |
| By: | Stefano Piasenti (University of Bologna); Süer Müge (HU Berlin) |
| Abstract: | Behavioral differences by biological sex are still not fully understood, suggesting that studying gender differences in behavioral traits through the lenses of continuous identity might be a promising avenue to understand the remaining observed gender gaps. Using a large U.S. online sample (N=2017) and machine learning, we develop and validate a new continuous gender identity measure consisting of separate femininity and masculinity scores. In a first study, we identify ninety attributes from prior research and conduct an experiment to classify them as feminine and masculine. In a subsequent study, a different group of participants completes tasks designed to elicit behavioral traits that have been previously documented in the behavioral economics literature to exhibit binary gender differences. Data for the second study are collected in two waves; the first wave serves as a training sample, allowing us to identify key attributes predicting behavioral traits, create candidate identity measures, and select the most effective one, comprising sixteen attributes, based on predictive power. Finally, we use the second wave (test sample) to validate our gender identity measure, which outperforms existing ones in explaining gender differences in economic decision-making. We show that confidence, competition, and risk are associated with masculinity, while altruism, equality, and efficiency are with femininity, providing new possibilities for targeted policymaking. |
| Keywords: | Biological sex; Gender identity; Machine learning; Online experiment; |
| JEL: | D91 J16 J62 C91 |
| Date: | 2024–10–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rco:dpaper:513 |
| By: | Franz Dietrich (Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris School of Economics, CNRS); Kai Spiekermann (London School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | While the importance of social norms for shaping and transforming communities is uncontested, their nature and normativity are controversial. Most recent theorists take social norms to arise if members hold certain attitudes, such as expectations on others, perhaps along with certain behaviours. Yet attitudes do not create norms, let alone social norms or social normativity. Social norms are instead made: through a social process. Social norming processes are special communication processes, often non-verbal and informal. We present different versions of a process-based account of social norms and social normativity. The process-based view brings social norms closer to legal norms, as processes represent social 'acts' just as laws and contracts arise through acts rather than mere attitudes, for instances acts of voting or signing |
| Keywords: | social norms; normativity |
| JEL: | D70 D71 |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mse:cesdoc:24009 |