26,156 research outputs found
Experimental Economics: Applications to Environmental Policy
Incentives, regulations and other policy interventions intended to promote sustainability work through influencing human behaviour. There is therefore much to be gained from a thorough understanding of exactly how various policy interventions relate to the decision-making process. Experimental economics, and the closely related fields of behavioural economics and behavioural finance, apply an empirical approach to study how people act when faced with a range of economic and social scenarios. The experimental approach was pioneered by Vernon Smith and Daniel Kahneman and others, building on early studies by Chamberlin (1948). In recognition of this work, Kahneman and Smith were awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. This paper briefly reviews the applications and methods of experimental economics, relates some key research findings and describes some examples of its use in informing environmental policy.Experimental economics, Behavioral economics, Environmental economics, Environmental markets, Market-based instruments, MBIs
The Emergence of Coordination in Public Good Games
In physical models it is well understood that the aggregate behaviour of a system is not in one to one correspondence with the behaviour of the average individual element of that system. Yet, in many economic models the behaviour of aggregates is thought of as corresponding to that of an individual. A typical example is that of public goods experiments. A systematic feature of such experiments is that, with repetition, people contribute less to public goods. A typical explanation is that people “learn to play Nash” or something approaching it. To justify such anexplanation, an individual learning model is tested on average or aggregate data. In this paper we will examine this idea by analysing average and individual behaviour in a series of public goods experiments. We analyse data from a series of games of contributions to public goods and firstly to see what happens, if we follow the standard approach and test a learning model on the average data. We then look at individual data, examine the changes that this produces and see if somegeneral model such as the EWA (Expected Weighted Attraction) with varying parameters can account for individual behaviour. We find that once we disaggregate data such models have poor explanatory power. Groups do not learn as supposed, their behaviour differs markedly from one group to another, and the behaviour of the individuals who make up the groups also varies within groups. The decline in aggregate contributions cannot be explained by resorting to a uniformmodel of individual behaviour.Experimental Economics; Public Goods; Learning models;Individual and Aggregate behaviour.
Communication, Advice and Beliefs in an Experimental Public Goods Game
We study the efficacy of horizontal versus vertical social learning processes in a public goods game. In one treatment, subjects about to play the game can make nonbinding common knowledge announcements about their intentions while, in another, subjects do not communicate directly with group members but receive common knowledge advice from the previous generation of players. A third treatment has subjects play with neither communication nor advice. We find that groups that engage in peer communication achieve much lower levels of contribution to the public good than do groups that receive advice. We attribute this finding in part to the fact that some subjects in the communication treatment opted to make no announcement during the communication phase of play.Voluntary contributions mechanism, Advice, Communication, Beliefs, Experiments.
Sustainable consumption: towards action and impact. : International scientific conference November 6th-8th 2011, Hamburg - European Green Capital 2011, Germany: abstract volume
This volume contains the abstracts of all oral and poster presentations of the international scientific conference „Sustainable Consumption – Towards Action and Impact“ held in Hamburg (Germany) on November 6th-8th 2011. This unique conference aims to promote a comprehensive academic discourse on issues concerning sustainable consumption and brings together scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines.
In modern societies, private consumption is a multifaceted and ambivalent phenomenon: it is a ubiquitous social practice and an economic driving force, yet at the same time, its consequences are in conflict with important social and environmental sustainability goals. Finding paths towards “sustainable consumption” has therefore become a major political issue. In order to properly understand the challenge of “sustainable consumption”, identify unsustainable patterns of consumption and bring forward the necessary innovations, a collaborative effort of researchers from different disciplines is needed
XTribe: a web-based social computation platform
In the last few years the Web has progressively acquired the status of an
infrastructure for social computation that allows researchers to coordinate the
cognitive abilities of human agents in on-line communities so to steer the
collective user activity towards predefined goals. This general trend is also
triggering the adoption of web-games as a very interesting laboratory to run
experiments in the social sciences and whenever the contribution of human
beings is crucially required for research purposes. Nowadays, while the number
of on-line users has been steadily growing, there is still a need of
systematization in the approach to the web as a laboratory. In this paper we
present Experimental Tribe (XTribe in short), a novel general purpose web-based
platform for web-gaming and social computation. Ready to use and already
operational, XTribe aims at drastically reducing the effort required to develop
and run web experiments. XTribe has been designed to speed up the
implementation of those general aspects of web experiments that are independent
of the specific experiment content. For example, XTribe takes care of user
management by handling their registration and profiles and in case of
multi-player games, it provides the necessary user grouping functionalities.
XTribe also provides communication facilities to easily achieve both
bidirectional and asynchronous communication. From a practical point of view,
researchers are left with the only task of designing and implementing the game
interface and logic of their experiment, on which they maintain full control.
Moreover, XTribe acts as a repository of different scientific experiments, thus
realizing a sort of showcase that stimulates users' curiosity, enhances their
participation, and helps researchers in recruiting volunteers.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, 2013 Third International Conference on
Cloud and Green Computing (CGC), Sept. 30 2013-Oct. 2 2013, Karlsruhe,
German
Exploring social gambling: scoping, classification and evidence review
The aim of this report is to speculate on the level of concern we might have regarding consumer risk in relation to ‘social gambling.’ In doing so, this report is intended to help form the basis to initiate debate around a new and under-researched social issue; assist in setting a scientific research agenda; and, where appropriate, highlight concerns about any potential areas that need to be considered in terms of precautionary regulation. This report does not present a set of empirical research findings regarding ‘social gambling’ but rather gathers information to improve stakeholder understanding
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