On Representative Social Capital

This paper analyzes data for a random sample drawn from the Dutch population who reveal their propensity to invest and reward investments in building up social capital by means of an economic experiment.We find substantial heterogeneity and asymmetries in the propensity to invest and in the propensity to reward investments.In particular, we find strong evidence that the young, elderly, and low educated individuals invest relatively less, but are relatively more likely to reward investments in social capital.On the other hand, labor market participation, income, and religion do not have any significant impact on behavior in the experiment. Series: CentER Discussion PaperSocial Capital Investments;Experimental Economics;Representative samples

On the Relevance and Composition of Gifts within the Firm: Evidence from Field Experiments

We investigate the economic relevance and the composition of gifts within a firm where output is contractible. We develop a structural econometric model that identifies workers' optimal reaction to monetary gifts received from their employer. We estimate the model using data from two separate field experiments, both conducted within a tree-planting firm. We use the estimated structural parameters to generalize beyond the experiment, simulating how workers would react to different gifts on the part of the firm, within different labour-market settings. We find that gifts have a role to play within this firm, increasing in importance when the workers' outside alternatives deteriorate. Profit-maximizing gifts would increase profits within slack labour markets by up to 10% on average and by up to 17% for certain types of workers. These gifts represent significant increases in worker earnings; the average gift paid to workers attains 22% of average expected earnings in the absence of gifts. We find that gifts should be given by setting piece-rates above the market-clearing level rather than through fixed wages.gift giving, structural models, field experiments

Sorting, Incentives and Risk Preferences: Evidence from a Field Experiment

The, often observed, positive correlation between incentive intensity and risk has been explained in two ways: the presence of transaction costs as determinants of contracts and the sorting of risk-tolerant individuals into firms using high-intensity incentive contracts. The empirical importance of sorting is perhaps best evaluated by directly measuring the risk tolerance of workers who have selected into incentive contracts under risky environments. We use experiments, conducted within a real firm, to measure the risk preferences of a sample of workers who are paid incentive contracts and face substantial daily income risk. Our experimental results indicate the presence of sorting; Workers in our sample are risk-tolerant. Moreover, their level of tolerance is considerably higher than levels observed for samples of individuals representing broader populations. Interestingly, the high level of risk tolerance suggests that both sorting and transaction costs are important determinants of contract choices when workers have heterogeneous preferences.Risk aversion, sorting, incentive contracts, field experiments

The Structural Estimation of Principal-Agent Models by Least Squares: Evidence from Land Tenancy in Madagascar

We develop a method to structurally estimate principal-agent models by ordinary least squares (OLS). We set up a general principal-agent model which explicitly incorporates the wealth levels of each party and the opportunity cost to the agent of entering the contract. This yields an optimal contract that is linearized by way of an Nth order Taylor approximation. This in turn imposes N(3N-1)/2 restrictions on the parameters and yields an empirical test of the canonical principal-agent model. In the application, we consider the case where N = 2 and apply our method to a sample of land tenancy contracts in rural Madagascar. Empirical tests lead to consistent failure to reject the hypotheses derived from our structural model, which lends support to our structural method as well as to the canonical principal-agent model.Principal-Agent Models, Contract Theory, Structural Estimations, Risk and Uncertainty, C12, C13, D86, O12, Q12,

Actions and Beliefs: Estimating Distribution-Based Preferences Using a Large Scale Experiment with Probability Questions on Expectations

We combine the choice data of proposers and responders in the ultimatum game, their expectations elicited in the form of subjective probability questions, and the choice data of proposers ("dictator") in a dictator game to estimate a structural model of decision making under uncertainty.We use a large and representative sample of subjects drawn from the Dutch population.Our results indicate that there is considerable heterogeneity in preferences for equity in the population.Changes in preferences have an important impact on decisions of dictators in the dictator game and responders in the ultimatum game, but a smaller impact on decisions of proposer's in the ultimatum game, a result due to proposers subjective expectations about responders' decisions.The model which uses subjective data on expectations has better predictive power and lower noise level than a model which assumes that players have rational expectations.ultimatum game;inquity aversion;subjective expectations

Preferences, Intentions, and Expectations: A Large-Scale Experiment With a Representative Subject Pool

We specify and estimate an econometric model which separately identifies distributional preferences and the effects of perceived intentions on responder behavior in the ultimatum game. We allow the effects of perceived intentions to depend, among other things, on the subjective probabilities responders attach to the possible offers. We estimate the model on a large representative sample from the Dutch population. We find that the relative importance of distributional preferences and perceived intentions depends significantly on the socioeconomic characteristics of responders. Strong inequity aversion to the other player’s disadvantage is found for lower educated and older respondents. Responders tend to punish unfavorable offers more if they expect that fair proposals will occur with higher probability.Inequity aversion;intentions;subjective expectations

Myopic Loss Aversion: Information Feedback vs. Investment Flexibility

We experimentally disentangle the effect of information feedback from the effect of investment flexibility on the investment behavior of a myopically loss averse investor.Our findings show that varying the information condition alone suffices to induce behavior that is in line with the hypothesis of Myopic Loss Aversion.information;investment

Increasing the Action Gap: New Operators for Reinforcement Learning

This paper introduces new optimality-preserving operators on Q-functions. We first describe an operator for tabular representations, the consistent Bellman operator, which incorporates a notion of local policy consistency. We show that this local consistency leads to an increase in the action gap at each state; increasing this gap, we argue, mitigates the undesirable effects of approximation and estimation errors on the induced greedy policies. This operator can also be applied to discretized continuous space and time problems, and we provide empirical results evidencing superior performance in this context. Extending the idea of a locally consistent operator, we then derive sufficient conditions for an operator to preserve optimality, leading to a family of operators which includes our consistent Bellman operator. As corollaries we provide a proof of optimality for Baird's advantage learning algorithm and derive other gap-increasing operators with interesting properties. We conclude with an empirical study on 60 Atari 2600 games illustrating the strong potential of these new operators