Run For Fun: Intrinsic Motivation and Physical Performance

Abstract: We use data from the 24-hours Belluno run which has the unique characteristic that participants are affiliated with teams and run for an hour. This allows us not only to study the individual relationship between age and performance but also to study group dynamics in terms of accessions to and separations from teams in a manner that closely resembles workers and firms when individual productivity would have been perfectly observable. From our analysis we conclude that individual performance goes down with age, although the speed-age gradient is rather at. Group performance goes down with age as well, but interestingly a counterbalancing force emerges, namely team dynamics that are driven by performance of runners who enter and leave.Age;performance;attrition

The Effect of Group Identity on Distributive Choice : Social Preference or Heuristic?

Group identity can influence significantly people's attitudes toward monetary allocations. In this paper we reassess the representation of group identity using social preference models. First, we show that the influence of group identity varies unsystematically across different types of mini-dictator games and cannot be described using a well-behaved preference function. Second, we demonstrate that the effect is not robust to slightly increasing the complexity of the task, suggesting that group identity is a framing effect that can be easily displaced by alternative decision heuristics

Competition and subsequent risk-taking behaviour: Heterogeneity across gender and outcomes

This paper studies if competition affects subsequent risk-taking behaviour by means of a laboratory experiment that manipulates the degree of competitiveness of the environment under equivalent monetary incentives. We find that competition increases risk aversion, especially for males, but not in a significant manner. When conditioning on the outcome, we find that males become significantly more risk averse after losing the tournament than after randomly earning the same low payoff. In contrast, males do not become more risk-seeking after winning the tournament, while females\u2019 average risk-taking behaviour is unaffected by tournament participation and outcomes. Our findings can be rationalized using the results of the literature on self-serving attribution

Monetary effects of inequality: lessons from the euro experiment

We propose a new explanation for the decoupling of official and perceived inflation based on relative consumption concerns. In presence of high inequality, when the consumers\u2019 reference point of consumption is more distant to reach, a tight budget constraint is likely to be misperceived as a currency\u2019s loss of purchasing power. Using data from a set of 15 European countries in the period 1990-2008, we estimate the effect of inequality on inflation perception. Our research design exploits the exogenous variation in inequality induced by the reduction in social expenditure that accompanied the implementation of the convergence criteria set up by the Maastricht treaty, in the years preceding the Euro changeover. Our results confirm that an increase in inequality significantly affects the deviation of inflation perceptions from actual inflation

Pd/Ti electrocatalyst in technological significance reactions

New materials operating as future electrocatalysts into fuel cells or in environmental remediation processes are continuously under research. Here we studied palladium modified electrodes, such as Pd/Ti and Pd/GC (glassy carbon), which are electrochemically built and used in chromate detection, in oxygen reduction and alcohols oxidation reaction. The palladium material electrodeposited at constant potential was characterized by X-ray diffraction, and scanning electron microscopy. The response of Pd/Ti nanoelectrodes, by oxygen reduction was observed in alkaline and acid supporting electrolytes. The diffusion coefficient of 2 10-5 cm2/s with a transference of 4e -in 0.1M H2SO4 solution was calculated. A higher coefficient value in 0.05 M NaOH was evaluated, because Ti substrate is also active in oxygen reduction in alkaline media. The reduction of Cr(VI) with Pd/Ti electrode proceeds at +0.58 V vs Ag/AgCl in H2SO4 0.1M, with a diffusion coefficient of 2.210-5 0.01 cm2/s and a linear range between 0.019 -0.69 mM Cr(VI). The lowest sensitivity 0.5 M Cr(VI) was determined with Pd/Ti electrode in the range permissible by drinking water of The oxidation of alcohol molecules in alkaline environment showed by Tafel curves, the activity order on Pd/Ti electrocatalyts is ethanoln-propanol >ethylene glycol. The calibration curve obtained by anodic peak current density of cyclic voltammetries upon an increasing alcohol concentration (3 to 90 mM alcohol) in NaOH 0.05 M, permitted to evaluate an activity of PdTi(+0.1V)PdTi(-0.3V)>PdTi(-0.9V). The performance of Pd/Ti electrocatalysts was better when compared with a modified Pd/GC electrocatalyst, in the studied reactions.Fil: Aguirre, María del Carmen. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Córdoba. Instituto de Física "Enrique Gaviola"; ArgentinaFil: Fuentes, A. S.. Universidad Nacional de Catamarca. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; ArgentinaFil: Filippin, A. F.. Universidad Nacional de Catamarca. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentin

A novel 3D absorption correction method for quantitative EDX-STEM tomography.

This paper presents a novel 3D method to correct for absorption in energy dispersive X-ray (EDX) microanalysis of heterogeneous samples of unknown structure and composition. By using STEM-based tomography coupled with EDX, an initial 3D reconstruction is used to extract the location of generated X-rays as well as the X-ray path through the sample to the surface. The absorption correction needed to retrieve the generated X-ray intensity is then calculated voxel-by-voxel estimating the different compositions encountered by the X-ray. The method is applied to a core/shell nanowire containing carbon and oxygen, two elements generating highly absorbed low energy X-rays. Absorption is shown to cause major reconstruction artefacts, in the form of an incomplete recovery of the oxide and an erroneous presence of carbon in the shell. By applying the correction method, these artefacts are greatly reduced. The accuracy of the method is assessed using reference X-ray lines with low absorption.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme under Grant Agreement 312483 - ESTEEM2 (Integrated Infrastructure Initiative–I3), as well as from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement 291522 - 3DIMAGE. A.N.F. and A.B. acknowledge project MAT2013-42900-P from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and REGPOT-CT-2011-285895-AlNANOFUNC.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ultramic.2015.09.01

Click‘n’Roll : No Evidence of Illusion of Control

Evidence of illusion of control\u2014the fact that people believe to have control over pure chance events\u2014is a recurrent finding in experimental psychology. Results in economics find instead little to no support. In this paper we test whether this dissonant result across disciplines is due to the fact that economists have implemented only one form of illusory control. We identify and separately tests in an incentive-compatible design two types of control: (a) over the resolution of uncertainty, as usually done in the economics literature, and (b) over the choice of the lottery, as sometimes done in the psychology literature but without monetary payoffs. Results show no evidence of illusion of control, neither on choices nor on beliefs about the likelihood of winning

Family background, self-confidence and economic outcomes

In this paper we analyze the role played by self-confidence, modeled as beliefs about one's ability, in shaping task choices. We propose a model in which fully rational agents exploit all the available information to update their beliefs using Bayes\u2019 rule, eventually learning their true type. We show that when the learning process does not converge quickly to the true ability level, small differences in initial confidence can result in diverging patterns of human capital accumulation between otherwise identical individuals. If differences in self-confidence are correlated with socio-economic background (as a large body of empirical literature suggests), self-confidence can be a channel through which education and earning inequalities perpetuate across generations. Our theory suggests that cognitive tests should take place as early as possible, in order to avoid that systematic differences in self-confidence among equally talented people lead to the emergence of gaps in the accumulation of human capita

The Patron Game with Heterogeneous Endowments : A Case Against Inequality Aversion

In this paper we provide a direct test of the inequality aversion hypothesis based on aggregate outcomes using the Patron Game, a version of a Public Good Game that mandates that only one member of a group contributes to the public good. We find evidence that inequality aversion does not play any role, as the average contribution does not increase when the distribution of endowments is manipulated to generate a situation of favorable inequality for the patron, compared to the case in which there is no inequality ex ante

An experimental study of the POUM hypothesis

The \u201cprospect of upward mobility\u201d (POUM) hypothesis formalised by Benabou and Ok (2001a) finds explicit assumptions under which some individuals that are poorer than the average optimally choose to oppose redistribution policies. The underlying intuition is that these individuals rationally expect to be richer than average in the future. This result holds provided the mobility process is concave in expectations, redistribution policies are expected to last for a sufficiently long period and individuals are not too risk averse. This paper tests the POUM hypothesis by means of a within subjects experiment where the concavity of the mobility process, the degree of social mobility, the knowledge of personal income and the degree of inequality are used as treatments. Other determinants of the demand for redistribution, such as risk aversion and inequality aversion are (partially) controlled for via either the experiment design or the information collected during the experiment. We find that the POUM hypothesis holds under alternative specifications, even when we control for individual fixed effects