Essays on delegation and social norms

This thesis presents the results of my doctoral studies at Middlesex University London. It contains different papers related to Labour Markets and presents some results on production, delegation and dishonest behaviour. The first study compares how group size interacts with both constrained and un-constrained resource environments, finding that resource limitations diminish production over time and that all the groups learn with experience. The second explores the effects of incentives in dishonest behaviour in both the gain and loss domain finding that contrary to theoretical predictions, subjects do not cheat more when they are facing a loss. The third, studies the distributions derived from different delegation scenarios. We find that the distributions derived from optional delegation are more egalitarian than the ones made under compulsory delegation. Finally, I study gender differences in delegation finding that gender biases only arise in compulsory delegation, and not under endogenous delegation, and at an agent level

Self-selecting into being a dictator: distributional consequences

We allow for principals to self-select into delegating, or not, the allocation decision to an agent in a modified dictator game. The standard dictator game arises when principal´s choose to make the allocation decision themselves. Dictators thus obtained transfer lower amounts to receivers, relative to when the decision making is passed to an agent under delegation (or in the standard dictator game). Principals choose to be a dictator nearly half of the time. The average amount transferred by individuals who delegate in more than half of the rounds is significantly higher than the quantity transferred by those who choose to delegate in less than half of the rounds. Finally, the distributional consequences of delegating, or not, vary with less inequality obtained when the decision is delegated

Gender differences in cheating: loss vs gain framing

We use the die-paradigm to study gender differences in cheating behavior. We find that i) both males and females do not cheat in the absence of financial incentives, ii) both males and females cheat (but not maximally) if reports are associated with financial gains or losses, and iii) males and females do not cheat differentially