6,797 research outputs found

    Theories of Fairness and Reciprocity

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    Most economic models are based on the self-interest hypothesis that assumes that all people are exclusively motivated by their material self-interest. In recent years experimental economists have gathered overwhelming evidence that systematically refutes the self-interest hypothesis and suggests that many people are strongly motivated by concerns for fairness and reciprocity. Moreover, several theoretical papers have been written showing that the observed phenomena can be explained in a rigorous and tractable manner. These theories in turn induced a new wave of experimental research offering additional exciting insights into the nature of preferences and into the relative performance of competing theories of fairness. The purpose of this paper is to review these recent developments, to point out open questions, and to suggest avenues for future research

    An experimental study of costly coordination

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    This paper reports data for coordination game experiments with random matching. The experimental design is based on changes in an effort-cost parameter, which do not alter the set of Nash equilibria nor do they alter the predictions of adjustment theories based on imitation or best response dynamics. As expected, however, increasing the effort cost lowers effort levels. Maximization of a stochastic potential function, a concept that generalizes risk dominance to continuous games, predicts this reduction in efforts. An error parameter estimated from initial two-person, minimum-effort games is used to predict behavior in other three-person coordination games

    Patients with basal ganglia damage show preserved learning in an economic game.

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    Both basal ganglia (BG) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) have been widely implicated in social and non-social decision-making. However, unlike OFC damage, BG pathology is not typically associated with disturbances in social functioning. Here we studied the behavior of patients with focal lesions to either BG or OFC in a multi-strategy competitive game known to engage these regions. We find that whereas OFC patients are significantly impaired, BG patients show intact learning in the economic game. By contrast, when information about the strategic context is absent, both cohorts are significantly impaired. Computational modeling further shows a preserved ability in BG patients to learn by anticipating and responding to the behavior of others using the strategic context. These results suggest that apparently divergent findings on BG contribution to social decision-making may instead reflect a model where higher-order learning processes are dissociable from trial-and-error learning, and can be preserved despite BG damage

    Preferences For Redistribution and Perception of Fairness: An Experimental Study

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    Why is there significant political support for progressive taxation and equalizing government transfers in western democracies? Possibilities include individual socail preferences for a less unequal distribution than what market forces alone would dictate, demand for social insurance, or successful political coalitions to redistribute away from the rich. We study the relative importance of fairness preferences, risk aversion, and self-interest in determining support for redistribution through a set of experiments in which a large number of subjects are asked to choose what level of taxation to implement under different decision conditions and with four alternative determinants of pre-tax income (two task-based, one random, and one based on socio-economic background). Treatments using varying costs of redistribution to the decision-maker and efficiency losses to recipients are used to study willingness to pay for redistribution and concern for aggregate inefficiency. Most of our subjects prefer that there be less inequality among others and demand for redistribution responds in predictable ways to the cost of taxation and to the dead-weigh loss associated with it. The external validity of the experiment is supported by the high correlation between tax decisions and political preferences. We also find evidence that preferred levels of redistribution are highly responsive to whether pre-tax incomes are determined according to task performance, a trend that is much more evident among men than among woman. Comparisons between redistributive choices under different experimental conditinos provide interesting insights with regard to the relative importance of inequality aversion and self-interest when choosing under uncertainty and when uncertainty is resolved. In the first case, individuals expectation about their future position in the income distribution has a considerable impact on their tax choices. When sure of the effect on their own earnings, subjects tax choices are primarily goverened by self-interest, but fairness preferences continue to play a role.

    Modeling the Psychology of Consumer and Firm Behavior with Behavioral Economics

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    Marketing is an applied science that tries to explain and influence how firms and consumers actually behave in markets. Marketing models are usually applications of economic theories. These theories are general and produce precise predictions, but they rely on strong assumptions of rationality of consumers and firms. Theories based on rationality limits could prove similarly general and precise, while grounding theories in psychological plausibility and explaining facts which are puzzles for the standard approach. Behavioral economics explores the implications of limits of rationality. The goal is to make economic theories more plausible while maintaining formal power and accurate prediction of field data. This review focuses selectively on six types of models used in behavioral economics that can be applied to marketing. Three of the models generalize consumer preference to allow (1) sensitivity to reference points (and loss-aversion); (2) social preferences toward outcomes of others; and (3) preference for instant gratification (quasi-hyperbolic discounting). The three models are applied to industrial channel bargaining, salesforce compensation, and pricing of virtuous goods such as gym memberships. The other three models generalize the concept of gametheoretic equilibrium, allowing decision makers to make mistakes (quantal response equilibrium), encounter limits on the depth of strategic thinking (cognitive hierarchy), and equilibrate by learning from feedback (self-tuning EWA). These are applied to marketing strategy problems involving differentiated products, competitive entry into large and small markets, and low-price guarantees. The main goal of this selected review is to encourage marketing researchers of all kinds to apply these tools to marketing. Understanding the models and applying them is a technical challenge for marketing modelers, which also requires thoughtful input from psychologists studying details of consumer behavior. As a result, models like these could create a common language for modelers who prize formality and psychologists who prize realism

    A Contextual-Bandit Approach to Personalized News Article Recommendation

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    Personalized web services strive to adapt their services (advertisements, news articles, etc) to individual users by making use of both content and user information. Despite a few recent advances, this problem remains challenging for at least two reasons. First, web service is featured with dynamically changing pools of content, rendering traditional collaborative filtering methods inapplicable. Second, the scale of most web services of practical interest calls for solutions that are both fast in learning and computation. In this work, we model personalized recommendation of news articles as a contextual bandit problem, a principled approach in which a learning algorithm sequentially selects articles to serve users based on contextual information about the users and articles, while simultaneously adapting its article-selection strategy based on user-click feedback to maximize total user clicks. The contributions of this work are three-fold. First, we propose a new, general contextual bandit algorithm that is computationally efficient and well motivated from learning theory. Second, we argue that any bandit algorithm can be reliably evaluated offline using previously recorded random traffic. Finally, using this offline evaluation method, we successfully applied our new algorithm to a Yahoo! Front Page Today Module dataset containing over 33 million events. Results showed a 12.5% click lift compared to a standard context-free bandit algorithm, and the advantage becomes even greater when data gets more scarce.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

    The Economics of Fairness, Reciprocity and Altruism – Experimental Evidence and New Theories

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    This paper surveys recent experimental and field evidence on the impact of concerns for fairness, reciprocity and altruism on economic decision making. It also reviews some new theoretical attempts to model the observed behavior.Behavioural Economics; Other-regarding Preferences; Fairness; Reciprocity; Altruism; Experiments; Incentives; Contracts; Competition

    Duration problem: basic concept and some extensions

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    We consider a sequence of independent random variables with the known distribution observed sequentially. The observation nn is assumed to be a value of one order statistics such as s:n-th, where 1 is less than s is less than n. It the instances following the nnth observation it may remain of the s:m or it will be the value of the order statistics r:m (of m> n observations). Changing the rank of the observation, along with expanding a set of observations there is a random phenomenon that is difficult to predict. From practical reasons it is of great interest. Among others, we pose the question of the moment in which the observation appears and whose rank will not change significantly until the end of sampling of a certain size. We also attempt to answer which observation should be kept to have the "good quality observation" as long as possible. This last question was analysed by Ferguson, Hardwick and Tamaki (1991) in the abstract form which they called the problem of duration. This article gives a systematical presentation of the known duration models and a new modifications. We collect results from different papers on the duration of the extremal observation in the no-information (denoted as rank based) case and the full-information case. In the case of non-extremal observation duration models the most appealing are various settings related to the two extremal order statistics. In the no-information case it will be the maximizing duration of owning the relatively best or the second best object. The idea was formulated and the problem was solved by Szajowski and Tamaki (2006). The full-information duration problem with special requirement was presented by Kurushima and Ano (2010)
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