121 research outputs found
Competitiveness of entrepreneurs and salaried workers
We measure the willingness to compete of entrepreneurs and salaried workers in an experiment. Participants can choose between a piece-rate and a tournament scheme either in private or in public. We find that in the private condition entrepreneurs are less competitive than salaried workers, but that in the public condition this ordering is reversed. Survey data suggest that perceived norms of appropriate behavior, along with beliefs about the instrumental value of competitiveness for professional success, can explain why entrepreneurs are more competitive when decisions are publicly observable. We also find that the latter condition improves the quality of experimental decisions
Moral suasion and charitable giving
This is the final version. Available on open access from nature Research via the DOI in this recordData availability:
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.We investigate the effect of moral suasion on charitable giving. Participants in an online experiment choose between two allocations, one of which includes a donation to a well-known charity organization. Before making this choice, they receive one of several messages potentially involving a moral argument from another participant. We find that the use of consequentialist and deontological arguments has a positive impact on the donation rate. Men respond strongly to consequentialist arguments, while women are less responsive to moral suasion altogether. Messages based on virtue ethics, ethical egoism, and a simple donation imperative are ineffective.Austrian Science Fund (Fonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung
On Fair Selection in the Presence of Implicit Variance
Quota-based fairness mechanisms like the so-called Rooney rule or four-fifths
rule are used in selection problems such as hiring or college admission to
reduce inequalities based on sensitive demographic attributes. These mechanisms
are often viewed as introducing a trade-off between selection fairness and
utility. In recent work, however, Kleinberg and Raghavan showed that, in the
presence of implicit bias in estimating candidates' quality, the Rooney rule
can increase the utility of the selection process.
We argue that even in the absence of implicit bias, the estimates of
candidates' quality from different groups may differ in another fundamental
way, namely, in their variance. We term this phenomenon implicit variance and
we ask: can fairness mechanisms be beneficial to the utility of a selection
process in the presence of implicit variance (even in the absence of implicit
bias)? To answer this question, we propose a simple model in which candidates
have a true latent quality that is drawn from a group-independent normal
distribution. To make the selection, a decision maker receives an unbiased
estimate of the quality of each candidate, with normal noise, but whose
variance depends on the candidate's group. We then compare the utility obtained
by imposing a fairness mechanism that we term -rule (it includes
demographic parity and the four-fifths rule as special cases), to that of a
group-oblivious selection algorithm that picks the candidates with the highest
estimated quality independently of their group. Our main result shows that the
demographic parity mechanism always increases the selection utility, while any
-rule weakly increases it. We extend our model to a two-stage selection
process where the true quality is observed at the second stage. We discuss
multiple extensions of our results, in particular to different distributions of
the true latent quality.Comment: 27 pages, 10 figures, Economics and Computation (EC'20
Emirati women do not shy away from competition: evidence from a patriarchal society in transition
We explore gender attitudes towards competition in the United Arab Emirates—a traditionally patriarchal society which in recent times has adopted numerous policies to empower women and promote their role in the labor force. The experimental treatments vary whether individuals compete in single-sex or mixed-sex groups. In contrast to previous studies, women in our sample are not less willing to compete than men. In fact, once we control for individual performance, Emirati women are more likely to select into competition. Our analysis shows that neither women nor men shy away from competition, and both compete more than what would be optimal in monetary terms as the fraction of men in their group increases. We offer a detailed survey of the literature and discuss possible reasons for the lack of gender differences in our experiment
Sabotage in Contests: A Survey
A contest is a situation in which individuals expend irretrievable resources to win valuable prize(s). ‘Sabotage’ is a deliberate and costly act of damaging a rival’s' likelihood of winning the contest. Sabotage can be observed in, e.g., sports, war, promotion tournaments, political or marketing campaigns. In this article, we provide a model and various perspectives on such sabotage activities and review the economics literature analyzing the act of sabotage in contests. We discuss the theories and evidence highlighting the means of sabotage, why sabotage occurs, and the effects of sabotage on individual players and on overall welfare, along with possible mechanisms to reduce sabotage. We note that most sabotage activities are aimed at the ablest player, the possibility of sabotage reduces productive effort exerted by the players, and sabotage may lessen the effectiveness of public policies, such as affirmative action, or information revelation in contests. We discuss various policies that a designer may employ to counteract sabotage activities. We conclude by pointing out some areas of future research
Stated and revealed inequality aversion in three subject pools
This paper reports data from three subject pools (n=717 subjects) using techniques based on those of Loewenstein, et al. (1989) and Blanco, et al. (2011) to obtain parameters, respectively, of stated and revealed inequality aversion. We provide a replication opportunity for those papers, with two innovations: (i) a design which allows stated and revealed preferences to be compared at the individual level; (ii) assessment of robustness of findings across subjects from a UK university, a Turkish university and Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our findings on stated aversion to inequality are qualitatively similar to those of Loewenstein, et al. in each of our subject pools, whereas there are notable differences between some of our findings on revealed preference and those of Blanco, et al. We find that revealed advantageous inequality aversion is often stronger than revealed dis-advantageous inequality aversion. In most subject pools, we find some (weak) correlation between corresponding parameters of stated and revealed inequality aversion
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