The self-concept maintenance theory holds that many people will cheat in order to maximize self-profit, but only to the extent that they can do so while maintaining a positive self-concept. Mazar, Amir, and Ariely (2008, Experiment 1) gave participants an opportunity and incentive to cheat on a problem-solving task. Prior to that task, participants either recalled the Ten Commandments (a moral reminder) or recalled 10 books they had read in high school (a neutral task). Results were consistent with the self-concept maintenance theory. When given the opportunity to cheat, participants given the moral-reminder priming task reported solving 1.45 fewer matrices than did those given a neutral prime (Cohen's d = 0.48); moral reminders reduced cheating. Mazar et al.'s article is among the most cited in deception research, but their Experiment 1 has not been replicated directly. This Registered Replication Report describes the aggregated result of 25 direct replications (total N = 5,786), all of which followed the same preregistered protocol. In the primary meta-analysis (19 replications, total n = 4,674), participants who were given an opportunity
Plott and Zeiler (2005) report that the willingness-to-pay/willingness-to-accept disparity is absent for mugs in a particular experimental setting, designed to neutralize misconceptions about the procedures used to elicit valuations. This result has received sustained attention in the literature. However, other data from that same study, not published in that paper, exhibit a significant and persistent disparity when the same experimental procedures are applied to lotteries. We report new data confirming both results, thereby suggesting that the presence or absence of a disparity may be a more complex issue than some may have supposed. (JEL C91, D12, D81, D83)
Srull and Wyer (1979) demonstrated that exposing participants to more hostility-related stimuli caused them subsequently to interpret ambiguous behaviors as more hostile. In their Experiment 1, participants descrambled sets of words to form sentences. In one condition, 80% of the descrambled sentences described hostile behaviors, and in another condition, 20% described hostile behaviors. Following the descrambling task, all participants read a vignette about a man named Donald who behaved in an ambiguously hostile manner and then rated him on a set of personality traits. Next, participants rated the hostility of various ambiguously hostile behaviors (all ratings on scales from 0 to 10). Participants who descrambled mostly hostile sentences rated Donald and the ambiguous behaviors as approximately 3 scale points more hostile than did those who descrambled mostly neutral sentences. This Registered Replication Report describes the results of 26 independent replications (N = 7,373 in the total sample; k = 22 labs and N = 5,610 in the
Several experimental studies have reported that an otherwise robust regularity -the disparity between Willingness-To-Accept and Willingness-To-Pay -tends to be greatly reduced in repeated markets, posing a serious challenge to existing referencedependent and reference-independent models alike. This paper offers a new account of the evidence, based on the assumptions that individuals are affected by good and bad deals relative to the expected transaction price (price sensitivity), with bad deals having a larger impact on their utility ('bad-deal' aversion). These features of preferences explain the existing evidence better than alternative approaches, including the most recent developments of loss aversion models.Keywords: WTA/WTP disparity, price sensitivity, bad-deal aversion, Vickrey auctions, reference-dependence, loss aversion. JEL classification: D11, D44 1The disparity between the Willingness-To-Accept (WTA) and Willingness-To-Pay (WTP) measures of value has been one of the most widely studied behavioural regularities in the last four decades. The disparity -which has been documented in a large number of contingent valuation and experimental studies 1 -poses serious challenges to Hicksian consumer theory and its applications to welfare economics.While in Hicksian consumer theory WTA and WTP can reasonably be expected to differ only by a few percentage points (Willig, 1976;Randall and Stoll, 1980) many studies have reported differences of much higher orders of magnitude. Such large disparities suggest that indifference curves are not reversible (Knetsch, 1989). They imply that the impact of policies that produce changes in resource allocation cannot be evaluated indifferently using the two measures, and that the resulting welfare changes cannot be approximated by changes in consumer's surplus. If improvements and deteriorations are regarded as highly asymmetrical, the Coase theorem no longer holds. Even in the absence of transaction costs and income effects, the outcome of a negotiation critically depends on the allocation of property rights. Yet, recently, several studies have found that the extent of the disparity is greatly reduced for experienced traders (List, 2003a(List, , 2004 and when agents repeatedly interact in experimental markets (e.g. Shogren et al., 2001;Loomes et al., 2003).Taken at face value, this whole body of evidence poses a theoretical puzzle.On the one hand, the existence and robustness of the disparity in one-off situations seems to indicate that preferences depart from the assumptions of standard consumer theory in systematic ways. This has led to the development of reference-dependent models that incorporate such departures (e.g. Tversky and Kahneman, 1991;Sugden, 2003;Köszegi and Rabin, 2006;Loomes et al., 2009). On the other hand, preferences elicited in experimental markets, in which subjects face feedback, repetition, and incentives, appear sometimes to be compatible with the properties generally assumed in reference-independent economic models. This paper offers a solu...
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