Trust spillovers in the sharing economy: Does international Airbnb experience foster cross-national trust?

Sharing economy platforms commonly claim to bring about positive social impacts, such as facilitating contact between individuals that would not have met otherwise. According to contact theory, such intergroup contact would change the stereotypes that individuals hold of outgroup members, such as people with a different nationality or ethnicity. We use a large-scale online Investment Game experiment among Airbnb users to study the effect of Airbnb interactions on cross-national trust. In contrast with common claims about the positive impact of the sharing economy, we did not find that individuals who had prior experience with a nationality as a host or a guest on Airbnb trusted persons of that nationality more. This may be because monetization, institutionalization and professionalization of Airbnb limits the intensity of contact, or because Airbnb mostly establishes contact between individuals with similar backgrounds

Exposure to images showing (non)adherence to physical distancing rules: Effect on adherence behavior and perceived social norms

INTRODUCTION: Adherence to behavioral measures such as physical distancing are key to mitigating the effects of viral pandemics such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Adherence depends in part on people's perception of what others do (descriptive norms) or approve of (injunctive norms). This study examines the effects that exposure to images depicting people following or breaking physical distancing rules have on perceptions of descriptive and injunctive norms and subsequent adherence behavior. METHODS: An online between-subjects experiment (n = 315) was conducted, in which participants were exposed to a set of five photographs of different public spaces in which people either did or did not adhere to physical distancing rules (pre-registration: https://www.osf.io/uek2p). Participants' adherence behavior was measured using a triangulation of measures (incentivized online behavioral task, vignettes, intention measure). Perceptions of relevant social norms were also measured. RESULTS: Mann-Whitney tests showed no effects of condition on perceptions of descriptive and injunctive norms or on adherence behavior. Linear regressions showed that both component paths of the indirect effect (condition on norm perceptions, and norm perceptions on adherence behavior) were non-significant, hence mediation analyses were not conducted. CONCLUSIONS: Exposure to images of people following (compared to breaking) physical distancing rules did not affect adherence to such rules or perceived norms. We surmise that a single exposure to such images, especially in the context of COVID-19, is insufficient to affect behavior. We therefore recommend performing a comparable experiment in which participants are exposed repeatedly to images showing people (non)adhering to a specific behavior in a particular context for a longer period

Jump bidding does not reduce prices: Field-experimental evidence from online auctions

One feature of online auctions that has attracted much interest is jump bidding, whereby a bidder raises the price by more than what is needed to become the highest bidder. The effects of jump bidding on the final selling price are unknown because past observational studies could not separate bidder interest from bidder behavior. Our study involves an in vivo experiment during live auctions on a large online auction platform. We intervened early in auctions at low, non-competitive price levels, either through jump bidding or through incremental bidding, and randomly varied the magnitude of our intervention. In contrast to leading theories in the auction literature, which predict a negative effect of jump bidding on the final selling price, we find that our jump bidding intervention has no effect on the final selling price

Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs

Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity-variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity-estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs-indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis

Context-dependent cheating: experimental evidence from 16 countries

Policy makers use several international indices that characterize countries according to the quality of their institutions. However, no effort has been made to study how the honesty of citizens varies across countries. This paper explores the honesty among citizens across sixteen countries with 1440 participants. We employ a very simple task where participants face a trade-off between the joy of eating a fine chocolate and the disutility of having a threatened self-concept because of lying. Despite the incentives to cheat, we find that individuals are mostly honest. Further, international indices that are indicative of institutional honesty are completely uncorrelated with citizens' honesty for our sample countries

Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs

Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity—estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs—indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis

Competing first-price and second-price auctions

This paper theoretically investigates which auctions are selected by competing sellers when they can choose between first-price auctions and second-price auctions, and when homogeneously risk averse bidders endogenously enter one of the auctions. In order to study this, we first consider bidders’ entry decisions between exogenously given auctions. We find that there exists a symmetric entry equilibrium that is unique and is characterized by a mixed strategy, which depends on whether bidders exhibit constant, decreasing or increasing absolute risk aversion. In a next step, we endogenize the sellers’ choice of auctions. We show that competing sellers have a dominant strategy to select first-price auctions if bidders exhibit nondecreasing absolute risk aversion. If bidders exhibit decreasing absolute risk aversion, other equilibria may exist in which sellers select second-price auctions as well. For instance, we demonstrate that sellers may select second-price auctions if the distribution of private values is sufficiently skewed

Jump bidding does not reduce prices: Field-experimental evidence from online auctions

This study examines the effects of jump bidding on final prices using an in vivo experiment during live auctions on a large online auction platform. The authors do not have permission to share the data, but the code for the empirical analyses can be accessed here