No myopic loss aversion in adolescents? An experimental note

Myopic loss aversion (MLA) has been found to play a persistent role for investment behavior under risk. We study whether MLA is already present during adolescence. Quite surprisingly, we find no evidence of MLA in a sample of 755 adolescents. This finding is at odds with previous findings, and it might be explained by self-selection effects. In other dimensions, however, we are able to replicate stylized findings in our pool of adolescents, such that teams invest higher amounts than individuals and that women invest less than men

Don't hate the player, hate the game: Uncovering the foundations of cheating in contests

Contests are meant to attract the best performers and incentivize high effort, however, they may also attract cheaters who try to win via illicit means which crowds out the best performers. We use a laboratory experiment to explore the role of self-selection in contests with a possibility of lying in a real effort task. Contrary to common wisdom, we do not find evidence that contests disproportionately attract intrinsic cheaters. However, we find that contests fail at selecting the best performers, as no difference is observed in the actual or perceived ability of those who selected into the contest versus those who selected into a comparable noncompetitive pay scheme

The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Experimental Evidence from Children's Intertemporal Choices

According to Chen's (2013) linguistic-savings hypothesis, languages which grammatically separate the future and the present (like English or Italian) induce less future-oriented behavior than languages in which speakers can refer to the future by using present tense (like German). We complement Chen's approach with experimentally elicited time preference data from a bilingual city in Northern Italy. We find that German-speaking primary school children are about 46% more likely than Italian-speaking children to delay gratification in an intertemporal choice experiment. The difference remains significant in several robustness checks and when controlling for a broad range of factors, including risk attitudes, IQ or family background

How strategic are children and adolescents? Experimental evidence from normal-form games

We examine the strategic sophistication of 196 children and adolescents, aged 10 to 17 years, in experimental normal-form games. Besides choices, we also elicit first- and second-order beliefs. The share of subjects playing Nash or expecting opponents to play Nash is fairly stable across all age groups. The likelihood of playing best response to own beliefs increases in math skills. Using a mixture model, about 40% of subjects are classified as a strategic type, while the others are non-strategic. The distribution of types is somewhat changing with age. The estimated error rates also show some dependency on age and gender

Children's cooperation and discrimination in a bilingual province

While discrimination and its economic implications have been studied in many different societies and based on a multitude of attributes like ethnicity, religion, gender, or language, the development of such behavior in children is still poorly understood. Here we present experimental evidence from a bilingual city in Northern Italy on whether the language spoken by a partner in a prisoner s dilemma game affects behavior. We examine how discrimination based on language develops in practically all six- to eleven-year old primary school children in the city. We find that cooperation increases with age and that both in-group favoritism and out-group discrimination emerge as children get older

The development of egalitarianism, altruism, spite and parochialism

Abstract: We study how the distribution of other-regarding preferences develops with age. Based on a set of allocation choices, we classify each of 717 subjects, aged 8 to 17 years, as either egalitarian, altruistic, or spiteful. We find a strong decrease in spitefulness with increasing age. Egalitarianism becomes less frequent, and altruism much more prominent, with age. Females are more frequently classified as egalitarian than males, and less often as altruistic. By varying the allocation recipient as either an in-group or an out-group member, we also study how parochialism develops with age. Parochialism emerges significantly in the teenage years

Social preferences in childhood and adolescence. A large-scale experiment to estimate primary and secondary motivations

We elicit social preferences of 883 children and teenagers, aged eight to 17 years, in an experiment. Using an econometric mixture model we estimate a subject\u2019s primary and secondary social preference motivations. The secondary motivation indicates the motivation that becomes relevant when the primary motivation implies indifference between various choices. For girls, particularly older ones, maximin-preferences are the most frequent primary motivation, while for boys efficiency concerns are most relevant. Examining secondary motivations reveals that girls are mostly social-welfare-oriented, with strong equity concerns. Boys are also oriented towards social welfare, but are more concerned with efficiency than with equity

Gender differences in the willingness to compete emerge early in life and persist

Published online: 31 October 2014Gender differences in the willingness to compete have been identified as one important factor in explaining gender differences in labor markets and within organizations. We present three experiments with a total of 1,570 subjects, ages three to 18 years, to investigate the origins of this gender gap. In a between-subjects design we find that boys are more likely to compete than girls as early as kindergarten and that this gap prevails throughout adolescence. Re-examining the behavior of 316 subjects in a within-subjects design two years later, we show that these gender differences also largely persist over a longer time period and can thus be considered stable. Controlling for subjects' abilities in the different tasks, their risk attitudes, and expected performance, the gender gap in the willingness to compete is estimated in the range of 10–20 percentage points. We discuss the implications of our findings for policy interventions and organizational management