Exchange in the Absence of Legal Enforcement: Reputation and Multilateral Punishment under Uncertainty

Prinicpal-agent problems can reduce gains from exchange available in long distance trade. One solution to mitigate this problem is multilateral punishment, whereby groups of principals jointly punish cheating agents by giving them bad reputations. But how does such punishment work when there is uncertainty regarding whether an agent actually cheated or was just the victim of bad luck? And how might such uncertainty be mitigated—or exacerbated—by nonobservable, pro-social behavioral characteristics? We address these questions by designing a simple modified trust game with uncertainty and the capacity for principals to employ multilateral punishment. We find that a modest amount of uncertainty increases overall welfare because principals are more willing to trust agents with bad reputation

Individualism, Collectivism, and Trade

While economists recognize the important role of formal institutions in the promotion of trade, there is increasing agreement that institutions are typically endogenous to culture, making it difficult to disentangle their separate contributions. Lab experiments that assign institutions exogenously and measure and control individual cultural characteristics can allow for clean identification of the effects of institutions, conditional on culture, and help us understand the relationship between behavior and culture, under a given institutional framework. We focus on cultural tendencies toward individualism/collectivism, which social psychologists highlight as an important determinant of many behavioral differences across groups and people. We design an experiment to explore the relationship between subjects’ degree of individualism/collectivism and their willingness to abandon a repeated, bilateral exchange relationship in order to seek potentially more lucrative trade with a stranger, under enforcement institutions of varying strength. Overall, we find that individualists tend to seek out trade more often than collectivists. A diagnostic treatment and additional analysis suggests that this difference may reflect both differential altruism/favoritism to in-group members and different reactions to having been cheated in the past. This difference is mitigated somewhat as the effectiveness of enforcement institutions increases. Nevertheless we see that cultural dispositions are associated with willingness to seek out trade, regardless of institutional environment

God games: An experimental study of uncertainty, superstition, and cooperation

This paper uses a novel lab experiment to test claims about the origins and functions of religion. We modify the standard public goods game, adding a computer-based agent that adjusts earnings in ways that might depend on players\u27 contributions. Our treatments employ three different descriptions of the adjustment process that loosely correspond to monotheistic, atheistic, and agnostic interpretations of the computer\u27s role. The adjustments neither mask players\u27 contributions nor magnify their impact. Yet players in all three adjustment treatments contribute much more than those who play the standard public goods game. Players\u27 contributions and survey responses show that adjustments induce superstitions in all treatments, with the strongest superstitions appearing in the quasi-monotheistic treatment and the weakest in the quasi-atheistic treatment. Text-based communication raises contributions and strengthens coordination. But when paired with the quasi-monotheistic description, communication also promotes counterproductive quests for winning numbers

Three essays on economic history and experimental economics

While economists recognize the important role of formal institutions in the promotionof trade, there is increasing agreement that institutions are typically endogenous to culture.The question remains how institutions interact with cultural variables when they areimposed exogenously. In social psychology, the individualism/collectivism distinction isthought to be an important cultural variable underlying many behavioral differences. Inthe first chapter, Erik kimbrough and I design an experiment to explore the relationship betweensubjects’ dispositions to individualism/collectivism and their willingness to engagein trade under enforcement institutions of varying strength. Overall, we find a positive effectof strong institutions on trade, but once we control for individualism/collectivism,institutions have no significant effect, and we observe that individualists engage in trademore often than collectivists. This suggests that cultural dispositions may even outweighinstitutions in the promotion of trade.The choice of enforcement mechanism in conducting long-distance trade has long beenassociated with cultural dispositions to individualism and collectivism. Nevertheless, theselection process of a formal or an informal enforcement mechanism and how it relatesto the reliability of the third party enforcement is unknown. In the second chapter, I designeda laboratory experiment in which the options for both a safe local trade and a riskyyet more profitable long-distance trade are available. Long-distance trade is governed byeither a formal or an informal enforcement mechanism. I examined the choice of informalversus formal enforcement mechanism while controlling for the cultural dispositionof subjects. I found that individuals with a collectivist cultural orientation used informalenforcement when effective formal enforcement is available significantly more frequentlythan those with an individualist orientation. Those with individualistic cultural orientationsubstituted formal enforcement for informal enforcement when the former created areliable contract.Enforceable property rights are the first steppingstones toward economic development.While nobles in some Western European countries successfully constrained sovereigns’arbitrary taxation, their Middle Eastern counterparts failed to gain similar rights. In thethird chapter, I compare the impact of Islamic inheritance law and that of primogeniture onthe welfare of economic agents. In the model, I define three types of agents: the sovereign,nobles and peasants. The nobles, unlike the peasants, own land. Furthermore, noblesalso own firms/estates that produce food. To protect their produce, nobles engaged ina conflict with an extractive sovereign to determine the tax rate. The findings demonstratedthat primogeniture led to a lower tax rate and higher welfare level for both noblesand the sovereign. Peasants, however, due to lower wages, suffered under primogeniture