Does consultation improve decision-making?

This paper reports an experiment designed to test whether prior consultation within a group affects subsequent individual decision-making in tasks where demonstrability of correct solutions is low. In our experiment, subjects considered two paintings created by two different artists and were asked to guess which artist made each painting. We observed answers given by individuals under two treatments: In one, subjects were allowed the opportunity to consult with other participants before making their private decisions; in the other, there was no such opportunity. Our primary findings are that subjects in the first treatment evaluate the opportunity to consult positively, but they perform significantly worse and earn significantly less

Behavioral Economics and the Public Sector

This thesis consists of four essays dealing with topics that are relevant for the public sector. The essays cover diverse issues of economics partly overlapping with political science. The topics reach from the taxation of labor over monetary policy to preferences over voting institutions. Throughout this thesis it is, in contrast to classical economics, not assumed that humans are necessarily fully rational. Once full rationality is no longer assumed, experiments become an important tool to learn about human behavior. Consequently, most of the work in this thesis makes use of economic experiments

Data for: Social preferences and voting on reform: An experimental study

Abstract of associated article: Debating over efficiency-enhancing but inequality-increasing reforms accounts for the routine business of democratic institutions. Fernandez and Rodrik (1991) hold that anti-reform bias can be attributed to individual-specific uncertainty regarding the distribution of gains and losses resulting from a reform. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate that anti-reform bias arising from uncertainty is mitigated by social preferences. We show that, paradoxically, many who stand to lose from reforms vote in favor because they value efficiency, while many who will potentially gain from reforms oppose them due to inequality aversion