Discontent with taxes and the timing of taxation : experimental evidence

Published in Revue économique, novembre 2019This paper reports results from a linear sanction cost variant of the power-to-take game, with implications for tax policies. We compare a pay-as-you-earn (PAYE) system with an ex-post taxation system in which payroll taxes are collected at the end of the fiscal year. Dissatisfaction with taxation, as proxied by the sanction in the power-to-take game, is significantly higher in an ex-post taxation system compared with the PAYE system. However, in anticipation of the higher sanction, the "tax authority" will not apply lower taxes in the former system. Communication does not decrease dissatisfaction in a significant manner, and it is not used extensively by participants.L’article présente les résultats d’une expérience basée sur une variante du jeu « power-to-take » avec des implications concernant les modalités de prélèvement de l’impôt sur le revenu. L’étude compare le système d’impôt à la source avec un système a posteriori, dans lequel l’impôt est prélevé bien après le moment où le contribuable a perçu le revenu brut. Dans cette seconde situation, les contribuables peuvent développer un sentiment de propriété du revenu total, et ressentir un mécontentement plus important, à taux d’imposition identique. Nos résultats indiquent que l’insatisfaction associée à l’impôt, mesurée par la sanction imposée sur l’agent qui prélève, est signi…cativement plus importante dans le système a posteriori comparée au prélèvement à la source. La communication vers le contribuable permet de réduire le taux de sanction, mais les participants n’exploitent pas vraiment cette opportunité

How does happiness relate to economic behaviour?: a review of the literature

This article reviews research on the relationship between happiness (subjective wellbeing) and economic behaviour. I describe how experimental and non-experimental methods have been used, across the social sciences, to investigate how happiness drives, and is driven by, particular behavioural tendencies. I consider interpersonal behaviour (selfishness, trust and reciprocity) and individual behaviour (risk and time preferences). Regarding interpersonal behaviour, a general conclusion is that happiness results from pro-social behaviour. Happiness negatively correlates with selfishness and positively correlates with trust; in both cases there is stronger evidence that the behaviour is a cause of happiness than a consequence of it. Individuals also gain happiness from inflicting costly punishment on those who have harmed them, although being happy reduces the degree to which people are willing to dole out such punishment in the first place. Regarding individual behaviour, the relationship between happiness and risk preferences remains unclear despite a large body of research on the topic, while there is evidence that happiness affects time preferences by reducing impatience. In all cases, I draw distinctions between the long- and short- term relationships between happiness and behaviour

ESSAYS ON RISK AND SOCIAL PREFERENCES: EVIDENCE FROM GENES, CULTURE, AND STRATEGIC INTERACTIONS

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Review of Language Studies in International Business: Suggestions and Future Directions for Japan

論

“Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies

Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model – based on self-interest – fails in all of the societies studied. Second, our data reveal substantially more behavioral variability across social groups than has been found in previous research. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the structure of social interactions explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation in everyday life, the greater the level of prosociality expressed in experimental games. Fourth, the available individual-level economic and demographic variables do not consistently explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

The Weirdest People in the World?

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers—often implicitly—assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species—frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, selfconcepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior—hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.external validity, population variability, experiments, cross-cultural research, culture, human universals, generalizability, evolutionary psychology, cultural psychology, behavioral economics

Responsible AI and Analytics for an Ethical and Inclusive Digitized Society

publishedVersio

Psychological and Neural Processing of Social Risk and Discrepancy in Major Depressive Disorder

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is one of the most prevalent health conditions in the world, characterised by persistent low mood and disruption to education, relationships, and employment. Disruption to social functioning is a core feature of MDD, and this dimension of the disorder may offer valuable insight into its aetiology. This thesis aims to extend our understanding of social processing in MDD by testing hypotheses generated from a socio-evolutionary theoretical framework of MDD, with particular emphasis on the Social Risk Hypothesis of Depressed Mood, which conceptualises depressed mood as an adaptive response to elevated risk of social exclusion. The thesis pursues these aims utilising novel protocols and neuroeconomic games to examine social risk-taking and self-discrepancies, and by examining the role of regions of the physical pain network in social function and processing of unexpected social information. The thesis consists of nine chapters; one general methodology chapter (Chapter 3), five chapters detailing novel experimental studies (Chapters 4,5,6,7 and 8), one describing a reanalysis of existing data (Chapter 2), one introductory chapter and one discussion chapter (Chapters 1 and 9 respectively). Across these chapters, the thesis presents neural and behavioural evidence that MDD is associated with reduced social risk-taking, increased sensitivity to an exclusion-relevant context (in-group interactions) and stronger enforcement of social norms. The thesis presents neural evidence of a negative processing bias for self-discrepancies in MDD, linked to activation in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula, and suggesting a role for perfectionism as a transdiagnostic sensitivity to such discrepancies. Suggestions for future research are discussed, including increased utilisation of neuroeconomic games, particularly in relation to assessing social function as a transdiagnostic marker. Overall, the thesis provides support for socio-evolutionary frameworks of affect, and highlights their unique perspective for understanding affective disorders, with some ‘deficits’ usefully reconceptualised as adaptive mechanisms