"Leadership with(out) Example: Path-Dependent Transparency Effects in a Threshold Public Goods Experiment"
(with Jing Li and Lin Jing)
Under Review
When multiple threshold projects simultaneously compete for funding, donors risk dispersing contributions too thinly for any project to succeed. We study whether a minimal leadership institution can resolve this coordination problem and how its effectiveness depends on whether followers observe the leader’s contribution in a laboratory experiment. We investigate two types of leadership: leading by choice, where a leader selects a focal project for the group, and leading by example, where the leader's contribution to the focal project is further revealed to the followers. We find that leading by choice substantially increases contributions without the leadership disadvantage typical of sequential public-good games. The positive effect of leading by choice is comparable to that of leading by example, and it outperforms a strategically equivalent single-project benchmark. However, after participants have experienced observable leader contributions, subsequently withholding that information causes a sharp decline in contributions -- driven entirely by leaders -- eliminating the advantage of leader-choice over the single-project benchmark. These results imply that focal-point creation through project selection can be as effective as leading by example, and that transparency policies on crowdfunding platforms and other multi-project threshold fundraising environments can be costly to reverse once established. Efficiency in such arenas requires path-dependency considerations.
"Green Markets: An Experimental Analysis of Technology and Policy"
(with Nicholas Busko)
This paper compares the effects of technology innovation and pricing policy in green markets on the provision of the public good. We extend the standard model of impure public goods to draw a distinction between green goods and green services, which are both subsets of impure goods. The motivating example of a green good with a price policy is a consumer installing a subsidized solar panel on her roof, while that of a green service is a consumer paying a surcharge for green electricity generated by her utility company. Experimentally, subjects face several sequential allocation decisions designed to mirror the underlying impure goods model. We find that increases in the technology of the impure good increase the public characteristic, as do increases in its subsidy and decreases in its surcharge. Equivalent technology and subsidy increases have identical effects, as do equivalent green good and green service markets (when the underlying technology is the same). In line with the previous literature, theoretically irrelevant impure goods actually decrease overall public provision. The added opacity of green markets also leads to greater efficiency loss in public provision than in private consumption. Market efficiency decreases as technology improves or as equivalent policy changes are made. Efficiency is significantly higher for individuals who indicate higher cognitive effort. These results taken together suggest a large toolbox is available to policymakers and that these tools can be complementary.
"Optimal Taxation and Impure Public Goods"
It has been shown that the introduction of a good that has portions of both private and public characteristics (an impure public good) can actually decrease the total level of the public characteristic provided. Using the standard impure public good model, I first isolate the conditions under which this occurs in a general equilibrium. I then introduce a central planner whose goal is to counteract this decrease. She chooses a tax rate for the purely private good, and spends the tax revenue generated to increase the provision of the public characteristic. In choosing the optimal tax rate, she minimizes the tax's deadweight loss subject to the total public characteristic given the tax and the impure good being at least as large as it was in the absence of both. I then identify the properties both of markets and of impure public goods that tend to necessitate such a situation, thus also identifying those which necessarily increase the resulting deadweight loss. It is suggested that such properties are harmful to society, either through the decrease in the public characteristic absent a planner or through the resulting increase in deadweight loss if a planner is present.
"Better Lucky than Good: The Role of Information in Other-Regarding Preferences"
There is anecdotal evidence that people often treat income earned by effort differently than that gained by luck, yet economists often overlook this distinction. Furthermore, others' income sources may often be (at least partially) obfuscated. I adapt a common inequality aversion model to allow for income distinction by source, for both own income and others', as well as for uncertainty over others' sources. I empirically test resulting hypotheses in a dictator game experiment wherein subjects gain income via both effort and luck. Dictators know recipients' income by source in control, but only total income in treatment. I find that partially informed dictators treated wealth as fully informed dictators did luck, but not as they did earnings-- nor as conditional expectations of recipient sources. This is evidence of social insurance rather than moral wiggle-room, and it also refutes an expected value approach.
"Theory and Experiments Exploring Behavioral, Financial, and Public Economics"
This is the final, accepted form of my dissertation. It contains earlier versions of three of the above-linked papers, and is therefore less current and less polished than those. I recommend reading the newer versions.