Many studies have investigated the role of socio-demographic factors (including gender, age, race), cognitive ability and cultural factors on time and risk preferences. Yet, research regarding the effect of mindfulness on risk and time preferences has been limited. This study investigates the association between mindfulness and time/risk preferences. We conducted a survey on a representative sample of the French adult population (N = 1154) in Spring 2020. We assessed individual mindfulness through the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS), and measured time and risk preferences with incentive-compatible economic games as well as self-reported questionnaires. Our results suggest that a higher level of mindfulness is associated with higher risk aversion and patience for stated preferences, but we found no relationship for revealed ones. We also observe that a higher level of mindfulness is related to greater time consistency, as we found a negative and significant association between the MAAS and the present and future biases.

Which factors can predict that someone complies with Covid-19 sanitary measures, like wearing masks or staying lock-down? Among decision-theoretic features, the literature has shown the importance of agents' (declared or revealed) risk attitude. This paper compares it with the precautionary attitude, in the form of the degree of support to the precautionary principle, which could be particularly relevant for the kind of situations faced with Covid-19. It states that, in the face of possible important harms, measures should be taken even if causal relationships have not been scientifically fully established. We administrate a web survey on a representative sample (N=1154) of the French population in May 2020. The results show that the adherance to the precautionary principle can explain why individuals comply with the sanitary measures. This suggests that the precautionary principle could be instrumental in improving complicance with sanitary measures in a pandemic.

This article studies the behavioral and socio-demographic determinants of reported compliance with prophylactic measures against COVID-19: barrier gestures, lockdown restrictions and mask wearing. The study contrasts two types of measures for behavioral determinants: experimentally elicited preferences (risk tolerance, time preferences, social value orientation and cooperativeness) and stated preferences (risk tolerance, time preferences, and the GSS trust question). Data were collected from a representative sample of the inland French adult population (N=1154) surveyed during the first lockdown in May 2020, and the experimental tasks were carried out on-line. The in-sample and out-of-sample predictive power of several regression models - which vary in the set of variables that they include - are studied and compared. Overall, we find that stated preferences are better predictors of compliance with these prophylactic measures than preferences elicited through incentivized experiments: self-reported level of risk, patience and trust are predicting compliance, while elicited measures of risk-aversion, patience, cooperation and prosociality did not.

We explore the relationships between age, risk tolerance, and impatience in a large sample representative of the metropolitan French adult population (n = 1154). We combine elicited preferences data based on an incentivized web experiment and stated preferences data based on self-reported survey measures. Concerning stated preferences, risk tolerance and impatience tend to decline with age. In contrast, our elicited measures reveal that risk tolerance increases with age, but that age has an insignificant effect on impatience. In addition, we observe that individuals who are more risk-tolerant are less impatient in the experimental tasks and that this relationship is independent of age. However, the stated preferences data reveals that higher risk tolerance is associated with higher impatience and that this relationship strengthens with age in the financial domain. We also discuss the issues raised by these contradictory findings across methods. 

In a natural field experiment, this paper aims to replicate the efficiency and acceptability of a nudge by default option. This nudge consists in setting zero-sugar as the default level of sugar in hot drinks vending machines in a French university. This university decided, independently of our research, to change the default option in the vending machines. We investigate the efficiency of this default option by observing the level of sugar that people actually choose. This campus is our treatment condition. We compare it with a control condition, which is a similar campus of another University in which the default option is set at three sugars. We expect that participants in the treatment condition consume less sugar than those in the control condition. We also expect that acceptability is stronger in the treatment condition than in the control condition. We also measure the acceptability judgment of people towards the nudge that they experience in the treatment condition, and compare it with the acceptability judgment of people towards an anticipated nudge by a zero-sugar default option in the control condition. The discussion addresses applied perspectives and theoretical implications.

The aim of this article is to better understand how judgments about nudge acceptability are formed and whether they can be manipulated. We conducted a randomized experiment with N=171 participants to test whether acceptability judgments could be (i) more favourable when the decision to implement the nudges was made following a consultation with the targeted population and (ii) influenced by the joint framing of the nudge’s purpose and effectiveness (in terms of an increase in desirable behaviour vs. decrease in undesirable behaviour). We tested these hypotheses on various nudge scenarios and obtained mixed results that do not clearly support our hypotheses for all nudge scenarios. A surprising result that calls for further work is that by mentioning that a nudge had been implemented through a consultation with the targeted population its acceptability could be lowered. 

This article is the first to test whether the attraction effect can be replicated among recommended options in a real digital marketplace, namely – an online flight aggregator. For this purpose, we conducted a large-scale field experiment on an existing flight aggregator, in which we varied the number of the options recommended at the top of the result list. More precisely, we investigated whether recommending an additional “decoy” option, which is asymmetrically dominated by one of the two former recommended options (the cheapest or the fastest itinerary), increases users' conversion rate and impacts the market share of the recommended options. Our results, based on the analysis of more than 140,000 search sessions, suggest that this is not the case in general. We then conduct analyses on subsamples to investigate the boundary conditions of the attraction effect. This study questions the relevance of the attraction effect in online marketplaces and recommender systems and proposes new research avenues. 

We test the effectiveness of a social comparison nudge to enhance lockdown compliance during the Covid-19 pandemic, using a metropolitan French representative sample (N=1154). Respondents were randomly assigned to a favourable/unfavourable informational feedback (daily road traffic mobility patterns) on peers’ lockdown compliance. Our dependent variable was the intention to comply with a possible future lockdown. We controlled for risk, time and social preferences and tested the effectiveness of the nudge. We unexpectedly found that the social comparison nudge was not effective among the whole population, but was effective only when the nudge’s recipient and the reference population shared the same geographical location. Exploratory results on this subsample (N=52) suggest that effectiveness could be driven by non-cooperative individual.

This paper investigates the relation between mindfulness and well-being in the context of compliance with prophylactic measures in the time of COVID-19. We conducted a large survey on a representative sample of the metropolitan French adult population. We measured mindfulness through the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale, and the extent to which respondents have been impacted by COVID-19 in their mood and quality of sleep, as well as how they comply with prophylactic measures. Our results suggest that more mindful individuals are less negatively impacted by COVID-19 with regard to their sleep and mood. Concerning prophylactic measures, we obtain mixed results: more mindful participants are more likely to respect lockdown, physical distancing and to cough in their sleeves, but do not wash their hands, wear masks, or avoid touching their face more often than others.

Recently quantum probability theory started to be actively used in studies of human decision-making, in particular for the resolution of paradoxes. Previous studies were based on a cognitive metaphor of the quantum double-slit experiment—the basic quantum interference experiment. In this paper, we report on an economics experiment based on a triple-slit experiment design, where the slits are menus of alternatives from which one can choose. The test of nonclassicality is based on the Sorkin equality (which was only recently tested in quantum physics). Each alternative is a voucher to buy products in one or more stores. The alternatives are obtained from all disjunctions including one, two or three stores. The participants have to reveal the amount for which they are willing to sell the chosen voucher. Interference terms are computed by comparing the willingness to sell a voucher built as a disjunction of stores and the willingness to sell the vouchers corresponding to the singleton stores. These willingness to sell amounts are used to estimate probabilities and to test both the law of total probabilities and the Born Rule. Results reject neither classical nor quantum probability. We discuss this initial experiment and our results and provide guidelines for future studies. 

Dans le cadre du premier appel à projet « Flash-COVID-19 » de l’Agence nationale de la recherche, nous avons mobilisé des méthodes récentes de l’économie comportementale afin de mieux comprendre les décisions des individus face à la crise sanitaire due à la pandémie de COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) et d’identifier les paramètres pouvant influencer le respect des mesures sanitaires. Cet article introduit brièvement l’économie comportementale, présente un compte rendu des attendus du projet CONFINOBS (Observance et observation des mesures barrières et du confinement : une approche d’économie comportementale) et de ses méthodes, puis il propose une synthèse des résultats obtenus.

Individuals are required to cope with uncertain, dispersed, incomplete, and incompatible sources of information in real life. We devised an experiment to reveal empirical “anomalies” in the process of acquisition, elaboration and retrieval of economic related information. Our results support the existence of a dual process in memory that is posited by the fuzzy-trace theory: acquisition of information leads to the formation of a gist representation which may be incompatible with the exact verbatim information stored in memory. We gave participants complex and complete information and then measured their cognitive ability. We conclude that individuals used their gist representation rather than processing verbatim information appropriately to make an evaluation. Finally, we provide evidence that subjects with low cognitive abilities tend to demonstrate more often this specific behavior. 

We investigate the relation between elicited social preferences and attentional contribution in a pro-social environment. For this purpose, we propose a new experiment, namely the “dustbin task”, where subjects invest real attention to reduce uncertainty in a discrimination task. We compare three different incentivized environments where the subject’s accuracy: do not impact on thier or other subjects’ payoffs (T0), impact their payoff only (Self-Interested treatment T1) and impact other subjects’ payoff only (Prosocial treatment T2). Our results show that both incentives (T1 and T2) increase the amount of allocated attention, regardless of the subject’s intrinsic motivation. We elicited subject social preferences and find that they cannot explain attentional contribution in pro-social environments (T2). This latter result, in contradiction with economic theory, provides new insight about social-preferences and attention allocation.

The allocation of attention should be studied through two complementary dimensions: 1) the amount of attentional resources that the individual allocate in the decision-making process and 2) the level of effective attention revealed by the quality of the decision-making process. In the literature, experimental studies measure mainly the first dimension while theoretical papers deal with the second, without the correspondence between these two dimensions being obvious. Our contribution aims to theoretically define a measure and propose an experimental method able to quantify effective attention and study the attention allocation process.

We investigate how curability and contagiousness of diseases influence the willingness to pay for screen tests, and how those effects are moderated by individuals' risk, time and social preferences.

The aim of our project is to test the effectiveness and acceptability of a new type of campaign to prevent risky  and unhealthy behaviors among the youth (18-25 years old), distributed via a digital channel: a smartphone game. The game is an investigation game where players have to find why a fictional character has disappeared, by having access to the content of his smartphone. The originality of our project is that the prevention tool is not the game as such, but the exposure to "hidden" additions in the architecture of the game. Thus, the player will not be aware of the preventive nature of the game and we expect to reach certain segments of the population resistant to classic prevention campaigns. Within the framework of an experiment with about 600 students, we intend to test the effectiveness of the introduction of various hidden prevention messages. The game is currently in development, as well as the definition of the content of the prevention messages, but the experiment is scheduled for September, 2022.

Companion studies of this project include (i) studying the moderating role of preferences in the effectiveness of the policy, (ii) defining the (a-priori) most impactfull messages, (iii) studying the acceptability of such policy.

We introduce a new experimental paradigm that reproduces route choice and travel booking incentive structure (a time-money trade-off). Participants are endowed with money and face a set of abstract travels (defined by their price, duration, departure time, travel conditions, carbon footprint, etc.). Participants who choose a travel have to pay the price of the travel and wait in the lab the indicated duration to receive additional rewards (i.e. the utility derived from traveling). This simple design allows the researcher to control the most relevant characteristics of route choice and travel booking. We provide several examples on how our design can be employed to answer important research question for researchers in transportation economics.

We test the attraction effect in delayed time-money trade-off through a laboratory controlled experiment. Participants have to book from binary abstract travel choice sets where all the travel characteristics are fixed except price and duration. Our treatment consists in adding in those binary choice sets a third ``decoy travel'' option that is asymmetrically dominated by the cheapest or the fastest travel. The attraction effect predicts that the introduction of the decoy increases the probability to choose the target option that dominates the decoy. Furthermore, we controlled for participants' cognitive profile using a Cognitive Reflection Test, a Need for Cognition Scale, and a Need to Evaluate Scale. We estimated the AE with several statistics strategies : we found no evidence for the attraction effect when introducing the decoy targeting the cheapest option, and mixed-evidence for a repulsion effect when introducing the decoy targeting the fastest option.

During the COVID-19 crisis, we measured risk, time and social preferences of representative sample of the metropolitan French population (N>1000) at three different point of time (May 2020, Sep 2021, and Dec 2022). Preferences are measured through incentive compatible economic games and self-reported questionnaires. We are studying how those preferences have evolved during the crisis and how this evolution is moderated by the strengh of the exposure to the pandemic (e.g. number of contact cases, number of tests, lengh and strengh of the symptoms in case of an infection, etc.) and by sociodemographical variable (age, gender, income, education, etc.). Preliminary analyses suggest that the willingness to take risk and the cooperativeness has increased  between Sep. 2021 and May 2020 and remain stable between Sep. 2021 and Dec. 2022.

We tested how default and information could nudges people to accept to receive information regarding meditation and mindfulness in order to reduce adverse psychological effect during the COVID-19 pandemic.