Research

When do two bargainers flip a coin? Experimental evidence (with Fabio Galeotti and Anders Poulsen)

We experimentally investigate an unstructured bargaining situation where two negotiators can, if both agree, get a non-binding recommendation from flipping a fair coin. We investigate how the likelihood of flipping a coin, and following the outcome of the coin flip, depends on what the feasible money payoffs are.  We compare the data with a condition where the outcome of the coin flip is binding, and with a control condition where no coin is available. Our data allow us to assess the importance of considerations based on procedural fairness, the presence of focal outcomes, whether the outcome of the coin flip is binding or not, and the risk of disagreement. 

Communication with partially verifiable information: an experiment (with Valeria Burdea and Martin Sefton)

We use laboratory experiments to study communication games with partially verifiable information. In these games, based on Glazer and Rubinstein (2004, 2006), an informed sender sends a two-dimensional message to a receiver, but only one dimension of the message can be verified. We investigate the effect of evidence and verification control using three treatments: one where messages are unverifiable, one where the receiver chooses which dimension to verify and one where the sender has this verification control. First, we find that evidence helps the receiver. Second, despite significant differences in behavior across the two verification treatments, receivers’ payoffs do not differ significantly across these treatments, suggesting they are not hurt by delegating verification control. We also show that a theoretically optimal receiver commitment strategy identified by Glazer and Rubinstein is close to being a best response to senders’ observed behavior in both treatments.

Attribution of responsibility in corrupt decisions (with Alex Possajennikov and Yuliet Verbel)

This paper studies responsibility attribution for outcomes of collusive bribery. In an experiment, we let either citizens or officials propose a bribe exchange that the other can accept or reject. We then ask a third party (victim or bystander) to judge the individual decisions of proposing and accepting a bribe exchange. We interpret their judgments as a measure of responsibility attribution. We find that officials are regarded as more responsible than citizens, particularly when acting as responders, and  victims do not consistently judge more negatively than bystanders. Under a neutral context, victims judge more severely than bystanders and they attribute more responsibility to the responder than to the proposer of the transaction. Our results highlight the importance of framing, labels and pivotality in responsibility attribution.

Social reference points and effort provision (with Patrick Maus and Martin Sefton)

We report a laboratory experiment testing whether social reference points impact effort provision. Subjects are randomly assigned the role of worker or peer and the worker observes the peer’s earnings before participating in a real-effort task. Between treatments, we exogenously manipulate peer earnings. We find that the workers recall the earnings of their peer and are less satisfied with their own earnings when their peer earns more. Despite this, we do not observe a treatment effect in effort choices. Thus, although our subjects appear to care about income differentials, this does not translate to a change in behavior in our incentivized environment. We relate our results to recent studies of inequality and effort provision.