Are International Educational Tests Good Accountability Tools?

incentives, education, School accountability, educational tests, TIMSS

Mediation and Conflict Management

Mediation is a popular process to manage conflicts, but there is little systematic insight into its mechanisms. This paper discusses the results from an experiment in which a mediator can induce two conflict parties to behave cooperatively. If the mediator recommends cooperative behavior and threatens to punish deviations, she achieves the efficient solution. Similar results even obtain if the mediator is biased towards one party or has no incentive to prevent the conflict. Communication between the mediator and the conflict parties increases cooperation, even if punishment is impossible. However, when cooperation fails, communication without punishment leads to particularly low payouts for the ‘losing’ party.Mediation, Conflict Prevention, Experiment, Communication, Punishment

Student Selection and Incentives

The paper discusses the impact of performance based selection in secondary education on student incentives. The theoretical approach combines human capital theory with signaling theory. The consideration of signaling offers an explanation for observed performance of educational systems with a standard peer effect argument. More specifically it can be optimal to select students according to ability even if selective systems do not outperform comprehensive systems in tests. Selection achieves the same output with lower private costs for the students. The paper questions the strong focus on educational tests to measure the efficiency of selective systems as long as these tests provide no information about a student’s incentives and private costs.Education, signalling, selection, ability grouping, incentives

Tracking and Incentives. A comment on Hanushek and Woessmann

tracking, selection, educational policy, tracking, selection

Regulation in the Market for Education and Optimal Choice of Curriculum

We analyze educational institutions’ incentives to set up demanding or lax curricula in duopolistic markets for education with endogenous enrolment of students. We assume that there is a positive externality of student achievement on the local economy. Comparing the case of regulated tuition fees with an unregulated market, we identify the following inefficiencies: Under regulated tuition fees schools will set up inefficiently lax curricula in an attempt to please low-quality students even if schools internalize some of the externality. On the other hand, unregulated schools set up excessively differentiated curricula in order to relax competition in tuition fees. Deregulation gets more attractive if a larger fraction of the externality is internalized.Education, Local Externalities, Product Differentiation, Price Competition, Vouchers

Envy and Loss Aversion in Tournaments

In tournaments, the large variance in effort provision is incompatible with standard economic theory. In our experiment we test theoretical predictions about the role of envy and loss aversion in tournaments. Our results confirm that envy implies higher effort while loss aversion increases the variance of effort. Moreover, we show that standard theory provides a good explanation for competitive behavior when envy and loss aversion do not play a role in the decision making process.Tournament, Envy, Loss Aversion

Horizontal and Vertical Social Preferences in Tournaments

Most studies find no collusion in tournaments. This result suggests that social preferences are irrelevant in this context. We investigate the impact of social preferences in a tournament using data from a laboratory experiment with two treatments. In a conentional tournament, an agent receives either the full prize or no prize at all. The other tournament provides the same incentives but the actual payment of an agent equals her expected payment. In both treatments the principal chooses between a fair and an unfair contract. Standard economic theory predicts the same effort provision in all situations. Our results show instead that envy between agents and the fairness of the principal determine the effectiveness of tournaments. Moreover, we observe that collusion between the agents and reciprocity towards the principal are mutually exclusive.Tournament, Collusion, Envy, Agency problem, Reciprocity

Doing Well by doing good - or doing better by delegating?

Machiavelli advises against delegating the distribution of favors. We test this claim in an experiment, in which an investor can directly transfer money to a trustee or delegate this decision to another investor. Varying the value of the transfers of the investor and the delegate, we find that the trustee’s rewards follow a rather simple pattern. In all situations, both investors are rewarded, but the person who actually decides gets a higher reward. Delegation only pays off for the initial decision maker if the value of the delegate’s transfer is much higher than the value of the investor’s transfer.Delegation, trusts, reciprocity, intentions, experiment

Size Matters - When it Comes to Lies

A small lie appears trivial but it obviously violates moral commandments. We analyze whether the preference for others’ truth telling is absolute or depends on the size of a lie. In a laboratory experiment we compare punishment for different sizes of lies controlling for the resulting economic harm. We find that people are sensitive to the size of a lie and that this behavioural pattern is driven by honest people. People who lie themselves punish softly in any context.Lying, norm violation, punishment, experiment