La red de ferrocarriles en el laboratorio

Las redes de transporte se construyen en espacios definidos y limitados por especificidades geográficas y límites geopolíticos. En consecuencia, dichas redes acaban asumiendo asimetrías inevitables, contrarias a los enfoques teóricos y experimentales tradicionales, definidos sobre espacios abstractos y, por tanto, ideales. Motivados por la necesidad de soluciones a un problema real más que por la mencionada crítica a la literatura publicada sobre redes de transporte, centramos nuestra atención en una red de transporte de ferrocarril existente. Concretamente, usamos información del mundo real sobre las características de la demanda de transporte de viajeros y la infraestructura de la red ferroviaria en España para construir un entorno experimental complejo, con el fin de testar la eficiencia de diferentes obligaciones alternativas de provisión de servicios impuestas a los operadores ferroviarios.Transport networks are built in specific, clearly defined locations, constrained by both geographical features and geopolitical parameters. As a consequence, transport networks display inevitable asymmetries that differ from the theoretical and experimental approaches to the matter, which are traditionally set in ideal, abstract spaces. Beyond the much-quoted criticism to literature on transport networks, and aiming to provide solutions to a real problem, this work focuses on a particular, existing railway network. Specifically, actual data concerning the characteristics of both the railway network infrastructure and the demands of passenger transportation in Spain has been gathered in order to build a complex experimental environment where the efficiency of the different obligations imposed to railway operators regarding service provision has been tested.Esta investigación recibió apoyo financiero del NET Institute (NY). El proyecto OPTIRED, financiado por el entonces Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación supuso el punto de partida de este trabajo

Self-selection bias in a field experiment: Recruiting subjects under different payment schemes

We examine a potential self-selection bias in different samples of experimental subjects depending on the payment scheme offered in the recruiting process. We ran four field experiments in which undergraduate students in a microeconomics course were invited to voluntarily set their own goal for the final exam. They were informed that they would be given a monetary reward (else nothing) if their actual grade were higher than or equal to their goal. Rewards were an increasing (quadratic) function of the goal. We aimed at studying whether subjects’ willingness to participate in the experiment depends on their expected performance under different advertised reward criteria, like a rank-order tournament and piece-rate pay. Given that judgments about future performance are closely tied to previous performance, the midterm exam scores from the current academic course are compared between participants and nonparticipants in order to analyze sample-sorting effects. We find that when a rank-order tournament is offered alone or in combination with another reward mechanism, high-performing students are more likely than low-performing ones to participate in the experiment

Framing and repetition effects on risky choices: A behavioural approach

Framing effects play an important role in individual decision-making under risk. This investigation revisits framing effects caused by two versions of the choice list procedure, lottery vs. lottery (LL) and lottery vs. certainty (LC). In the first, subjects face pairwise choices between lotteries within a choice list. In the second, subjects face pairwise choices between a safe amount and a lottery. In order to measure the sensitivity of subjects’ choices to the structure of the tasks, we implement an incentive-compatible experiment using repetition in order to have a robust measure of the subjects’ propensity to make a choice. Particularly, it is tested whether variations in the number of options offered in a choice list with and without variations in the range of options affect subjects’ choices. Our results suggest that changes in framework disturb subjects’ risk preferences only in the LC version when the range of options presented has been varied

When will the lockdown end? Confinement duration forecasts and self-reported life satisfaction in Spain: A longitudinal study

This paper reports results from a longitudinal study on the impact of the lockdown on daily self-reported life satisfaction levels during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain. A stable panel (N = 1,131) of adult subjects were surveyed during 84 consecutive days (March 29–June 20, 2020). They were asked to report daily life satisfaction and health state levels. Interestingly, daily life satisfaction increased during the lockdown. At the beginning of the experiment, subjects were asked to guess the end-week of the lockdown, against a possible monetary reward for accurate forecasts. Subjects predicting a longer lockdown period reported a higher average level of daily life satisfaction. Females reported on average lower levels of daily life satisfaction, but exhibited a stronger tendency to report higher levels of life satisfaction, the longer their lockdown forecast. Individual heterogeneity in life satisfaction levels can be partly attributed to personality traits, with neuroticism having a negative effect, while extraversion and agreeableness having a positive effect on daily life satisfaction

Risk attitude elicitation using a multi-lottery choice task: Real vs. hypothetical incentives

We present a bi-dimensional multi lottery choice task which can be used in order to elicit the agents' risk attitudes in financial environments. This task is implemented both with hypothetical and real monetary incentives in a between-subjects and a within-subjects experiment. We observe choices involving significantly lower risk aversion on aggregate when incentives are real. The differences grow with the stakes at play. We also obtain significant differences between hypothetical and real rewards in both utility weighting and probability weighting estimated parameters. We find that the use of hypothetical incentives in multi-lottery choice tasks for evaluating individual risk aversion can be misleading

Individual Characteristics vs. Experience: An Experimental Study on Cooperation in Prisoner's Dilemma

Cooperative behavior is often assumed to depend on individuals’ characteristics, such as altruism and reasoning ability. Evidence is mixed about what the precise impact of these characteristics is, as the subjects of study are generally randomly paired, generating a heterogeneous mix of the two characteristics. In this study we ex-ante create four different groups of subjects by factoring their higher or lower than the median scores in both altruism and reasoning ability. Then we use these groups in order to analyze the joint effect of the two characteristics on the individual choice of cooperating and on successful paired cooperation. Subjects belonging to each group play first 10 one-shot prisoner’s dilemma (PD) games with ten random partners and then three consecutive 10-round repeated PD games with three random partners. In all games, we elicit players’ beliefs regarding cooperation using an incentive compatible method. Individuals with high altruism are more optimistic about the cooperative behavior of the other player in the one-shot game. They also show higher individual cooperation and paired cooperation rates in the first repetitions of this game. Contrary to the one-shot PD games where high reasoning ability reduces the probability of playing cooperatively, the sign of the relationship is inverted in the first repeated PD game, showing that high reasoning ability individuals better adjust their behavior to the characteristics of the game they are playing. In this sense, the joint effect of reasoning ability and altruism is not linear, with reasoning ability counteracting the cooperative effect of altruism in the one-shot game and reinforcing it in the first repeated game. However, experience playing the repeated PD games takes over the two individual characteristics in explaining individual and paired cooperation. Thus, in a (PD) setting, altruism and reasoning ability significantly affect behavior in single encounters, while in repeated interactions individual and paired cooperation reach similarly high levels independently of these individual characteristics.Financial support by Universitat Jaume I (project P1.1B2015- 48) and the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness (projects ECO2013-44409-P and ECO2015-68469-R) is gratefully acknowledged

Risk-taking and fairness among cocaine-dependent patients in dual diagnoses: Schizophrenia and Anti-Social Personality Disorder

This study reports experimental results from a clinical sample of patients with a cocaine-related disorder and dual diagnosis: Schizophrenia and Anti-Social Personality Disorder. Both types of patients as well as a non-clinical group of students performed two incentivized decision-making tasks. In the first part of the experiment, they performed a lottery-choice task in order to elicit their degree of risk aversion. In the second part, they decided in two modified dictator games aimed at eliciting their aversion to advantageous and disadvantageous inequality. It is found that the Anti-Social Personality Disorder group exhibits no significant differences from the non-clinical sample in either task. However, compared with the students’ sample, subjects from the group with schizophrenia show more risk aversion and exhibit more aversion towards disadvantageous inequality

Take the money and run: psychopathic behavior in the trust game

We study the association among different sources of individual differences such as personality, cognitive ability and risk attitudes with trust and reciprocate behavior in an incentivized experimental binary trust game in a sample of 220 (138 females) undergraduate students. The game involves two players, player 1 (P1) and player 2 (P2). In the first stage, P1 decides whether to trust and let P2 decide, or to secure an egalitarian payoff for both players. If P1 trusts P2, the latter can choose between a symmetric payoff that is double than the secure alternative discarded by P1, and an asymmetric payoff in which P2 earns more than in any other case but makes P1 worse off. Before the main experiment, we obtained participants’ scores for Abstract Reasoning (AR), risk attitudes, basic personality characteristics, and specific traits such as psychopathy and impulsivity. During the main experiment, we measured Heart Rate (HR) and ElectroDermal Activity (EDA) variation to account for emotional arousal caused by the decision and feedback processes. Our main findings indicate that, on one hand, P1 trust behavior associates to positive emotionality and, specifically, to the extraversion’s warmth facet. In addition, the impulsivity facet of positive urgency also favors trust behavior. No relation to trusting behavior was found for either other major personality aspects or risk attitudes. The physiological results show that participants scoring high in psychopathy exhibit increased EDA and reduced evoked HR deceleration at the moment in which they are asked to decide whether or not to trust. Regarding P2, we find that AR ability and mainly low disagreeable disinhibition favor reciprocal behavior. Specifically, lack of reciprocity significantly relates with a psychopathic, highly disinhibited and impulsive personality. Thus, the present study suggests that personality characteristics would play a significant role in different behaviors underlying cooperation, with extraversion/positive emotionality being more relevant for initiating cooperation, and low disagreeable disinhibition for maintaining it

Risk aversion, overconfidence and private information as determinants of majority thresholds

We present and experimentally test a theoretical model of majority threshold determination as a function of voters’ risk preferences. The experimental results confirm the theoretical prediction of a positive correlation between the voter's risk aversion and the corresponding preferred majority threshold. Furthermore, the experimental results show that a voter's preferred majority threshold negatively relates to the voter's confidence about how others will vote. Moreover, in a treatment in which individuals receive a private signal about others’ voting behaviour, the confidence-related motivation of behaviour loses ground to the signal's strength