Publications
Publications
Changing Collective Action: Nudges and Team Decisions
with Florian Diekert
Games and Economic Behavior, 2024
Nudges are widely used and a broad literature documents that they successfully affect individual behavior. However, in most settings where nudges are needed to change collective action, teams – not individuals – determine outcomes. Because team decision making is pervasive, learning whether nudges work with teams in social dilemmas is important, especially when formal enforcement is difficult. Here, we show that a nudge increases team cooperation by 14 to 16 percentage points in a social dilemma among fishing crews at Lake Victoria, Tanzania. The nudge is particularly effective when team decisions are made by a team member with leadership experience. Our findings are a proof of concept that expands the toolkit of empirical researchers and policy makers that address social dilemmas among teams.
The Creation of Social Norms under Weak Institutions
with Florian Diekert, Joseph Luomba, and Israel Waichman
Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, 2022
Formal regulations often fail to ensure sustainable management of natural resources. An alternative approach could rely on the interaction of norm-based interventions and social sanctions. Our lab-in-the-field experiment with fishermen at Lake Victoria studies how a norm-based intervention, namely, social information about high or low levels of previous cooperation, affects behavior and beliefs in a prisoner’s dilemma game with or without weak social sanctioning. Providing different social information succeeds in creating different norms of cooperation, but only if sanctioning is possible: cooperation rates start at a high level and stay at a high level when social information emphasizes cooperation but start at a low level and stay at a low level when social information emphasizes defection. Without social sanctioning, cooperation rates decline, irrespective of the social information. Particularly participants with close connection to others in their experimental session conform to the behavior that is emphasized by the social information message under sanctioning.
Strategic Ignorance and the Perceived Efficacy of Taking Action
with Anca Balietti, Angelika Budjan, and Alice Soldà
Conditionally accepted at The Economic Journal
When useful information is distressing, it may deliberately be ignored. In this paper, we examine both theoretically and experimentally whether increasing perceived efficacy - the belief that one's actions can influence an outcome - reduces such strategic ignorance. Participants in India are given the choice to receive or avoid information about the average loss in life expectancy due to air pollution in their district and are later asked to recall it. We find that increasing perceived efficacy significantly improved recall, particularly among participants with optimistic prior beliefs. The pattern is confirmed when conducting the same experiment in the United States. Our theoretical framework highlights how perceived efficacy shapes the interplay between anticipatory and realized utility, thereby influencing strategic ignorance.
Individual preferences for public goods depend on personal benefits. We show that relative income perceptions affect beliefs about personal benefits and thereby preferences for public goods. In two survey experiments with Indian respondents on the topic of air pollution, we shift relative income perceptions using both a novel method that induces exogenous variation, and a standard information treatment. We then elicit preferences for air quality, including real-stakes contributions to environmental initiatives. When perceived relative income increases, right-wing supporters withdraw contributions. This coincides with reduced health concerns and lower adoption of private protection against pollution. Contributions are unchanged among center-left supporters.
Multi-Unit Willingness to Pay Elicitation in the Field
with Florian Diekert, Timo Goeschl, Santiago Gòmez-Cardona, and Joseph Luomba
We present and field-test a novel mechanism to elicit the willingness to pay (WTP) for multiple rather than for a single unit of a good. At each price of the canonical multiple price list (MPL) approach, we elicit varying multi-unit demand instead of limiting the choice to buying or not. The multi-unit MPL (muMPL) retains the simplicity of the MPL without adding much complexity, is field-ready, and generates rich, truthful, and reasonably precise WTP data. We showcase our mechanism in a challenging field environment and provide guidance on implementation of the muMPL.
Mom’s Purse or Dad’s Wallet? Experimental Evidence on Parental Spending in Tanzania (with Ingvild Almås, Orazio Attanasio, Bet Caeyers, Pamela Jervis, and Charlotte Ringdal)
Subsidizing Legal Production Inputs in an Open-Access Resource System (with Sorell deSilva, Florian Diekert, Timo Goeschl, Joseph Luomba, and Horace Owiti)