Justin Buffat

Publications

• The intrinsic value of decision rights: A replication and an extension to team decision making , 2023, (with Matthias Praxmarer and Matthias Sutter), Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

We present a replication of Bartling et al. (2014) who developed an experiment to measure the intrinsic value of decision rights. We can confirm their seminal results for individuals with remarkable accuracy, thus strongly confirming the prior of a robust result. Motivated by the observation that team decision making is ubiquitous, we then extend their design by studying how teams value decision rights. In the aggregate, we find no differences between individuals and teams. However, in our exploratory analysis, we uncover an important heterogeneity: teams with a smooth decision making process have much lower intrinsic values of decision rights than individuals, but teams with internal conflicts have much higher values, thus distorting decisions.

• Thinking and deciding to be an organ donor: An experimental analysis , 2020, (with Lorenz Goette and Simona Grassi), Social Science and Medicine

This paper describes the results from two field experiments in which we investigated how reflecting about organ donation affected the decision to become an organ donor and the reasons behind the decision. We also study the effect of a “commitment nudge” on immediate decisions. We find that reflection has a statistically significant negative effect on the decision to become an organ donor. The commitment nudge limits the tendency to adduce procrastination reasons for not making a decision, but does not lead to higher organ donor rates in the treatment group than in the control group. The results from this study will aid the design of effective sensitization campaigns and enrollment mechanisms for organ donation.

Working Papers

• Corruption, Punishment and Cooperation (with Julien Senn), 2019

Many social groups rely on centralized institutions to enforce cooperation and to punish free-riders. What happens if individuals, in particular the free-riders, can try to influence the person granted with the rights to punish? In this paper, we provide individuals with an opportunity to send small gifts, i.e. to bribe, the sanctioning authority. We show that these bribes dramatically reduce cooperation despite the fact that, in our setting, the gains from cooperation for the sanctioning authority might largely outweigh the gains from corruption. Two concurrent channels lead to this result. First, corruption undermines punishment: low contributors bribe the punishment authority, who reciprocates by assigning punishment points that are too low to discipline free-riders. Second, bribery has large negative social spillovers: high contributors are discouraged by the low cooperation rates and the weak norm enforcement prevailing in corrupt environments and thus gradually decrease their contributions. Finally, we show that a bottom-up anti-corruption policy which mobilizes peer sanctioning against bribery by enabling individuals to denounce corrupt authorities dramatically curbs corruption, improves norm enforcement and ultimately enhances cooperation. 

• Charitable Preferences and Expectation-Based Reference Dependence: An Experiment on Charitable Giving, 2018

In this paper, I investigate whether charitable preferences are affected by expectation-based reference points. I design a laboratory experiment to confront predictions from the standard model of altruism (Andreoni, 1989, 1990) with models of reference-dependent preferences (e.g. Köszegi and Rabin, 2006, 2007). Participants decided how much of their initial endowment they wish to pass to a charity of their choice. Before deciding, they were informed that with probability 50% their decision would not be implemented but an exogenous transfer would be deducted from their endowment and passed to the charity instead. Theories of expectation-based reference dependence predict that varying the level of the exogenous transfer affects decision making, while the standard theory predicts no effect. The experimental results suggest little evidence for reference dependence in this context, while the standard model of charitable giving better rationalizes the data. Finally, risk has a substantial effect on the decision to engage in charitable giving.

Selected Work in Progress

• Charismatic Leadership and Multiple Effort Provision: A Laboratory Experiment (with Christian Zehnder and John Antonakis), 2021

We implement a real-effort laboratory experiment to study the effects of charismatic leadership in a standard multi-task setting. We create an environment where subjects can choose between an easy and a hard task for a limited amount of time. Both tasks yield the same payment to the individual while the hardest task generates bigger revenues to a third party (modeled as a charity). In this framework, paying subjects for the total number of correctly performed tasks (either easy or hard) is expected to bias decisions towards picking the easy task more often, which in turn generates a very low surplus to the charity. In addition to manipulating the compensation scheme (flat wage vs piece rate), we also manipulate the nature of a video-recorded motivation speech (non-charismatic vs. charismatic) that is shown to subjects before performing the job. Both speeches contain the same information but the charismatic speech uses charismatic leadership techniques with the expectations to motivate workers to exert the greatest effort in choosing the hardest task more often. The process of data collection is ongoing.