Peer Punishment in Teams: Emotional or Strategic Choice?

Punishing the free-riders of a team can promote group efficiency but is costly for the punisher. For this reason, economists see punishment as a second-order public good. We show in an experiment that subjects do not value punishment for its deterrence but instead for the satisfaction of retaliating. Punishment choices are made with little strategic reasoning.experiments ; public goods ; informal punishment ; emotions ; legal systems

Group Cooperation Under Alternative Peer Punishment Technologies: An Experiment.

This paper experimentally studies peer punishment under three alternative technologies. We find that the choice of peer punishment technology has a substantial impact on group performance. First, under technology where at least two subjects in the group must agree before another group member can be punished, group cooperation and group net earnings are the highest. Second, outcomes are similar regardless of whether punishment choices are simultaneously or sequential. These results suggest that punishment is not perceived as a second-order public good but is instead an emotional reaction unresponsive to changes in the strategic environment.decentralized punishment ; public goods ; other-regarding preferences ; team production ; experiments

Trademarks, Product Variety, and Economic Activity in Italy and Europe

This paper studies the relationship between trademarks and economic activity. We compare the distribution of product classes across national, EU, and international trademarks deposited by Italian firms. In relation to EU trademarks, we analyze some characteristics of the deposits of major European countries. In particular, we compare "trademark specialization" to export specialization. A trademark is interpreted as a means to differentiate products, thus a greater number of trademarks deposited is associated with a higher degree of product differentiation. Our findings highlight that trademark protection "follows" quite closely the structure of the real economy, with some exceptions. Thus, those economic sectors where countries exhibit economic specialization also present a higher degree of product differentiation.Trademarks, Intellectual property rights, Specialization, Product variety

Group Cooperation Under Alternative Peer Punishment Technologies: An Experiment

This paper experimentally studies peer punishment under three alternative technologies. We find that the choice of peer punishment technology has a substantial impact on group performance. First, under a technology where at least two subjects in the group must agree before another group member can be punished, group cooperation and group net earnings are the highest. Second, outcomes are similar regardless of whether punishment choices are simultaneously or sequential. These results suggest that punishment is not perceived as a second-order public good but is instead an emotional reaction unresponsive to changes in the strategic environment.decentralized punishment, public goods, other-regarding preferences, team production, experiments.

Social Learning in Market Games

The aim of our experiments is to test the effect of different information settings on firms’ behaviour in duopoly price and quantity games. We find that, when players have full information on their rivals’ choices, the imitation rule prevails and such learning behaviour induces more competitive outcomes in the Cournot market designs. By the same token, when information on the average industrial profit is provided, there is evidence of an increase in cooperation, and the majority of players experiment with new strategies when their payoff falls below the average profit (F. Palomino and F. Vega-Redondo, 1999; H. Dixon, 2000)Learning, Cournot and Bertrand experiments

Information and Learning in Bertrand and Cournot Experimental Duopolies

In this paper we report the results from a series of experiments on Cournot (homogeneous and differentiated products) and Bertrand (differentiated products) duopoly markets with no uncertainty, fixed endpoints and random matching. For each set, the experiments are designed with three alternative information set up: I) no information (participants are only informed on their own payoff for the period), 2) average industrial profit (participants are informed on their own performance, as well as on the average profit in all markets), 3) imitation (players are informed, on request, on their rivals’ past successful actions). The effect of different information structures on individual behaviour in market experiments is a long debated issue. Recently, using evolutionary arguments, it has been argued that the imitation of successful strategies induces more competitive equilibria in market games (M. Schaffer, 1989; F. Vega-Redondo 1997). By the same token, the information on the industry’s average profitability might induce more collusive outcomes, if such markets signals are perceived by players as aspiration levels and if they therefore try new strategies anytime their profits fall below such threshold (F. Palomino and F. Vega-Redondo, 1999; H. Dixon, 2000). Our aim is to test such predictions in duopoly price and quantity games. We find that the imitation learning rule prevails when players have full information on their rivals’ previous choices, and such learning behaviour induces more competitive outcomes in the Cournot market designs. As for the aspiration learning rule, the evidence is unclear. Whilst in the majority of the cases, players experiment new strategies when their payoff falls below the average profit, as predicted by the aspiration rule, we find no evidence of convergence to collusion, though in the Cournot experiments, the fraction of players choosing cooperative actions in the last stages of the game significantly increase in the second information setting.Cournot and Bertrand Experiments, learning J.E.L. Classification: C91, D83

Social Influence in Trustors’ Neighborhoods

Economists have often analysed the impact that the spread of beliefs and behaviors have on the equilibrium and performance of markets. Recent experimental studies on peer pressure in groups of agents interacting in investment and gift exchange games (Mittone and Ploner, 2011, Gachter et al. 2010) have proved that the imitation of partners’ behaviors can have substantial effects on reciprocity, thus confirming that the effects of information also need to be studied in games where social preferences play a fundamental role. The aim of this paper is to ascertain whether trust is affected by contagion and herding in small groups of trustors who can observe each other’s choices over time. We account for three important factors of trustors’ preferences,namely: risk attitude, generosity and expected trustworthiness. Using our data we test the basic hypothesis that an individual's propensity to trust recipients in the Trust Game can be affected by the observed behavior of other trustors. Our results confirm that trust is affected by contagion effects. Furthermore, we find that specific types of agents (generous or untrusting) more often imitate the same type, when positioned in the same group. Finally, we find that untrusting individuals are less affected by their peers compared to generous individuals, and they imitate less even when positioned in groups of agents who have the same characteristics.trust game, experiments, social influence, imitation

Comparison of Integrated Digital Radiometer with Concurrent Water Vapor Radiometer Using the Alphasat Receivers in Milan, Italy

In June 2014, NASA Glenn Research Center (GRC) and the Politecnico di Milano (POLIMI) jointly deployed a pair of coherent 20 GHz and 40 GHz beacon receivers to the POLIMI campus in Milan, Italy to characterize the atmospheric channel at Ka- and Q-band within the framework of the Alphasat experiment. The Milan receivers observe the continuous-wave beacons broadcast over Europe by the Aldo Paraboni Technology Demonstration Payload (TDP #5), and, in September 2017, both channels were upgraded to incorporate a novel digital radiometer (DR) measurement which NASA has recently employed in other propagation measurement campaigns. In November 2016, a co-located water vapor radiometer (WVR) was also installed at POLIMI, and the concurrent data from both the WVR and DR thusly enables validation of this new DR technique against the established WVR. Herein, we preliminarily investigate the calibration of the DR measurements using the WVR data and also assess a calibration method that may be implemented where WVR data is not readily available