Do Social Networks Inspire Employment? - An Experimental Analysis -

There is robust field data showing that a frequent and successful way of looking for a job is via the intermediation of friends and relatives. Here we want to test this experimentally. Participants first play a simple public goods game with two interaction partners ('friends'), and share whatever they earn this way with two different sharing partners ('cousins') who have different friends. Thus one's social network contains two 'friends' and two 'cousins'. In the second phase of the experiment participants learn about a job opportunity for themselves and one additional vacancy and decide whom of their network they want to recommend and, if so, in which order. In case of coemployment, both employees compete for a bonus. Will one recommend others for the additional job in spite of this competition, will one prefer 'friends' or 'cousins' and how does this depend on contributions (of 'friends') or shared profits (with 'cousins')? Our findings are partly quite puzzling. Most participants, for instance, recommend quite actively but compete very fiercely for the bonus.

(Over-)Stylizing Experimental Findings and Theorizing with Sweeping Generality

Human decision making is a process guided by different and partly competing motivations that can each dominate behavior and lead to different effects depending on strength and circumstances. 'Over-stylizing' neglects such competing concerns and context-dependence, although it facilitates the emergence of elaborate general theories. We illustrate by examples from social dilemma experiments and inequality aversion theories that sweeping empirical claims should be avoided.decision theory, social dilemmas, inequality aversion, behavioral economics, experimental economics

Trading Goods versus Sharing Money - An Experiment Testing Wether Fairness and Efficiency are Frame Dependent

Systematic experiments with distribution games (for a survey, see Roth, 1995) have shown that participants are strongly motivated by fairness and efficiency considerations. This evidence, however, results mainly from experimental designs asking directly for sharing monetary rewards. But even when not just one kind of monetary tokens is distributed efficiency and fairness are less influential. We investigate and confirm this frame dependency more systematically by comparing net-trade-proposals and payoff-proposals for the same exchange economy with two traders, two commodities and multi-period-negotiations.

Satisficing in sales competition: experimental evidence

In a duopoly market, aspirations express how much sellers want to earn given their expectations about the other's behavior. We define individually and mutually satisficing sales behavior for given individual beliefs and aspirations. In a first experimental phase, whenever satisficing is not possible, beliefs, aspirations, or sales have to be adapted. In a second phase, testing the absorption of satisficing, participants are free to select nonsatisficing sales profiles. The results reveal that most people are satisficers who, either mandatorily or deliberately, tend to adjust aspiration levels if they cannot be satisfied.

Who cares when Value (Mis)reporting May Be Found Out? An Acquiring-a-Company Experiment with Value Messages and Information Leaks

We modify the Acquiring-a-Company game to study how information leaks affect lying and market outcomes in an ultimatum bargaining setting with asymmetric information. Privately informed sellers send messages about the alleged value of their company to potential buyers. Via random leaks buyers, however, can learn the true value before proposing a price which the seller finally accepts or not. Only 14.5% of the messages are truthful, whereas two-thirds of all sellers exaggerate the company’s value to persuade buyers to offer more, especially when the true value is small. Although a higher leak probability does not reduce the frequency of misreporting, it weakens overreporting and strengthens underreporting. Buyers who found out value misreporting anchor their price proposals on the true value but do not explicitly discriminate against liars. Sellers are mainly opportunistic and make their acceptances dependent on the resulting positive payoff. Even if ethical concerns do not seem to matter much, probabilistic leaks are welfare enhancing

Discovery of superthermal hydroxyl (OH) in the HH211 outflow

We present a 5-37 micron infrared spectrum obtained with the Spitzer Space Telescope toward the southeastern lobe of the young protostellar outflow HH211. The spectrum shows an extraordinary sequence of OH emission lines arising in highly excited rotational levels up to an energy E/k~28200K above the ground level. This is, to our knowledge, by far the highest rotational excitation of OH observed outside Earth. The spectrum also contains several pure rotational transitions of H2O (v=0), H2 (v=0) S(0) to S(7), HD (v=0) R(3) to R(6), and atomic fine-structure lines of [Fe II], [Si II], [Ne II], [S I], and [Cl I]. The origin of the highly excited OH emission is most likely the photodissociation of H2O by the UV radiation generated in the terminal outflow shock of HH211.Comment: ApJ Letters, in pres

Gender differences in yielding to social influence: An impunity experiment

In impunity games proposers, like allocators in dictator games, can take what they want; however, responders can refuse offers deemed unsatisfactory at own cost. We modify the impunity game via allowing offers to condition of another participant\u2019s counterfactual generosity intention. For a given pair of proposer candidates each states, via the strategy vector method, an intended and two adjusted offers: one (possibly) upward adjusted in case the intended offer of the other candidate is higher and one (possibly) downward adjusted in case it is lower. Additionally, each candidate determines an acceptance threshold for the responder role. Only one candidate in each pair is randomly selected and endowed as the actual proposer whose offer is either possibly upward or downward adjusted depending on the counterfactual offer of the other proposer candidate. The endowed proposer of one pair is matched with the non-endowed candidate of another pair in the responder role. The data confirm that counterfactual intentions of others often affect own generosity via substantial and significant average adjustments to the weakest social influence. Overall, offers seem correlated with acceptance thresholds. Furthermore, we find significant gender differences: female participants state lower intended and adjusted offers as well as acceptance thresholds and therefore appear to be less sensitive to social influence

Spitzer spectral line mapping of the HH211 outflow

Aims: We employ archival Spitzer slit-scan observations of the HH211 outflow in order to investigate its warm gas content, assess the jet mass flux in the form of H2 and probe for the existence of an embedded atomic jet. Methods: Detected molecular and atomic lines are interpreted by means of emission line diagnostics and an existing grid of molecular shock models. The physical properties of the warm gas are compared against other molecular jet tracers and to the results of a similar study towards the L1448-C outflow. Results: We have detected and mapped the v=0-0 S(0) - S(7) H2 lines and fine-structure lines of S, Fe+, and Si+. H2 is detected down to 5" from the source and is characterized by a "cool" T~300K and a "warm" T~1000 K component, with an extinction Av ~ 8 mag. The amount of cool H2 towards the jet agrees with that estimated from CO assuming fully molecular gas. The warm component is well fitted by C-type shocks with a low beam filling factor ~ 0.01-0.04 and a mass-flux similar to the cool H2. The fine-structure line emission arises from dense gas with ionization fraction ~0.5 - 5 x 10e-3, suggestive of dissociative shocks. Line ratios to sulfur indicate that iron and silicon are depleted compared to solar abundances by a factor ~10-50. Conclusions: Spitzer spectral mapping observations reveal for the first time a cool H$_2$ component towards the CO jet of HH211 consistent with the CO material being fully molecular and warm at ~ 300 K. The maps also reveal for the first time the existence of an embedded atomic jet in the HH211 outflow that can be traced down to the central source position. Its significant iron and silicon depletion excludes an origin from within the dust sublimation zone around the protostar. The momentum-flux seems insufficient to entrain the CO jet, although current uncertainties on jet speed and shock conditions are too large for a definite conclusion.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in A&

Detection of a Bipolar Molecular Outflow Driven by a Candidate First Hydrostatic Core

We present new 230 GHz Submillimeter Array observations of the candidate first hydrostatic core Per-Bolo 58. We report the detection of a 1.3 mm continuum source and a bipolar molecular outflow, both centered on the position of the candidate first hydrostatic core. The continuum detection has a total flux density of 26.6 +/- 4.0 mJy, from which we calculate a total (gas and dust) mass of 0.11 +/- 0.05 Msun and a mean number density of 2.0 +/- 1.6 X 10^7 cm-3. There is some evidence for the existence of an unresolved component in the continuum detection, but longer-baseline observations are required in order to confirm the presence of this component and determine whether its origin lies in a circumstellar disk or in the dense inner envelope. The bipolar molecular outflow is observed along a nearly due east-west axis. The outflow is slow (characteristic velocity of 2.9 km/s), shows a jet-like morphology (opening semi-angles ~8 degrees for both lobes), and extends to the edges of the primary beam. We calculate the kinematic and dynamic properties of the outflow in the standard manner and compare them to several other protostars and candidate first hydrostatic cores with similarly low luminosities. We discuss the evidence both in support of and against the possibility that Per-Bolo 58 is a first hydrostatic core, and we outline future work needed to further evaluate the evolutionary status of this object.Comment: 11 Pages, 6 Figures, 4 Tables. Accepted by Ap

Performance of CMS muon reconstruction in pp collision events at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

The performance of muon reconstruction, identification, and triggering in CMS has been studied using 40 inverse picobarns of data collected in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV at the LHC in 2010. A few benchmark sets of selection criteria covering a wide range of physics analysis needs have been examined. For all considered selections, the efficiency to reconstruct and identify a muon with a transverse momentum pT larger than a few GeV is above 95% over the whole region of pseudorapidity covered by the CMS muon system, abs(eta) < 2.4, while the probability to misidentify a hadron as a muon is well below 1%. The efficiency to trigger on single muons with pT above a few GeV is higher than 90% over the full eta range, and typically substantially better. The overall momentum scale is measured to a precision of 0.2% with muons from Z decays. The transverse momentum resolution varies from 1% to 6% depending on pseudorapidity for muons with pT below 100 GeV and, using cosmic rays, it is shown to be better than 10% in the central region up to pT = 1 TeV. Observed distributions of all quantities are well reproduced by the Monte Carlo simulation.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO