Work in progress
The Strategic Display of Emotions
Daniel Chen, Astrid Hopfensitz, Boris van Leeuwen and Jeroen van de Ven
Link to paper Short video presentation
Abstract: The emotion that someone expresses has consequences for how that person is treated. We study whether people display emotions strategically. In two laboratory experiments, participants play task delegation games in which managers assign a task to one of two workers. When assigning the task, managers see pictures of the workers and we vary whether getting the task is desirable or not. We find that workers strategically adapt their emotional expressions to the incentives they face, and that it indeed pays off to do so. Yet, workers do not exploit the full potential of the strategic display of emotions.
What is Deception in Experimental Economics? A Survey
Gary Charness, Anya Samek and Jeroen van de Ven
Abstract: It is almost a religion in experimental economics that deception is bad. But precisely what constitutes deception is unclear. This issue is a thorny one and is a major methodological concern for experiments both in the lab and in the field. While there is a consensus view that deliberate and explicit lies are not permitted, there are quite a few “gray areas” with respect to practices that omit information or are misleading without an explicit lie being told. In this paper, we report the results of a large (788 respondents) survey of experimental economists concerning various specific gray areas. First, perhaps surprisingly, we find that there is a great degree of heterogeneity in the responses. Second, there is considerable difference in opinions across our seven specific scenarios; in particular, the data indicate a perception that costs and benefits matter, so that such practices might in fact be appropriate when the topic is important and there is no other way to gather data. We also survey former undergraduate students (126 respondents) who had participated in experiments, again finding considerable heterogeneity in views. Compared to researchers, students have different attitudes about deceptive methods in the specific scenarios and are apparently mostly only bothered by such practices when this affects their pay. A real surprise is that few students express awareness of the no-deception policy at their former schools.
When Opportunities Backfire: Alternatives Reduce Perseverance and Success in Task Completion
Uri Gneezy, Vadim Nelidov, Theo Offerman and Jeroen van de Ven
Link to paper
Abstract: We consider an agent who needs to finish one task under time constraint. Would she be better if given the option to work on a single task, or benefit from having several alternatives of which she needs to complete one? In principle, adding alternatives could only help the agent, as she can choose to ignore them. In contrast, we conjecture that agents will switch attention between options, which is counterproductive. We test this conjecture experimentally. The control group receives a single task to work on, while the treated group has two optional tasks to choose from. In accordance with our conjecture, we find that having two alternatives negatively affects performance, even when the additional task is substantially easier than the original one. We discuss potential mechanisms and present evidence showing that many managers do not anticipate the negative effects.