Matteo M. Galizzi Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science, London School of Economics and Political AbstractWe present a lab-field experiment designed to systematically assess the external validity of social preferences elicited in a variety of experimental games. We do this by comparing behavior in the different games with several behaviors elicited in the field and with self-reported behaviors exhibited in the past, using the same sample of participants. Our results show that the experimental social preference games do a poor job explaining both social behaviors in the field and social behaviors from the past. We also include a systematic review and meta-analysis of previous literature on the external validity of social preference games.2

Repayment decisions—how much of the loan to repay and when to make the payments—directly influence consumer debt levels. The authors examine how minimum required payment policy and loan information disclosed to consumers influence repayment decisions. They find that while presenting minimum required payment information has a negative impact on repayment decisions, increasing the minimum required level has a positive effect on repayment for most consumers. Experimental evidence from U.S. consumers shows that consumers’ propensity to pay the minimum required each month moderates these effects; U.K. credit card field data indicate that borrowers’ credit limit and balance due also moderate these effects. However, increasing the minimum level is unlikely to completely eliminate the negative effect of presenting minimum payment information. In addition, disclosing supplemental information, such as future interest cost and time needed to repay the loan, does not reduce the negative effects of including minimum payment information and has no substantial positive effect on repayments. This research offers new insights into the debt repayment process and has implications for consumers, lenders, and public policy.

Pay what you want (PWYW) is a relatively new and promising pricing mechanism, where consumers have full control over the price they pay. It can potentially increase profits, but its practical applications have produced mixed results. The time of payment, and its implications for consumer uncertainty, might constitute an important determinant of the profitability of such pricing schemes for service providers. A large field experiment conducted in conventional and fast-food restaurants provides initial support that paying after consumption increases PWYW amounts. A laboratory study then details the underlying psychological process; payments after consumption help resolve uncertainty about the service process and service outcome. Another field experiment affirms these insights and further shows that PWYW after consumption, compared with fixed pricing, can increase profitability due to enhanced service capacity utilization. By detailing how timing and uncertainty reduction affect consumers' chosen payments, this article contributes to PWYW research in particular, as well as more general literature pertaining to the dynamics that affect consumers' service experiences and service pricing studies.

Recent research invokes preference imprecision to explain violations of individual decision theory. While these inquiries are suggestive, the nature and significance of such imprecision remain poorly understood. We explore three questions using a new measurement tool in an experimental investigation of imprecision in lottery valuations: Does such preference imprecision vary coherently with lottery structure? Is it stable on repeat measurement? Does it have explanatory value for economic behaviour? We find that imprecision behaves coherently, shows no tendency to change systematically with experience, is related to choice variability, but is not a main driver of the violations of standard decision theory that we consider.

Transitivity is the assumption that if a person prefers A to B and B to C, then that person should prefer A to C. This article explores a paradigm in which Birnbaum, Patton and Lott (1999) thought people might be systematically intransitive. Many undergraduates choose C = ($96, .85; $90, .05; $12, .10) over A = ($96, .9; $14, .05; $12, .05), violating dominance. Perhaps people would detect dominance in simpler choices, such as A versus B = ($96, .9; $12, .10) and B versus C, and yet continue to violate it in the choice between A and C, which would violate transitivity. In this study we apply a true and error model to test intransitive preferences predicted by a partially effective editing mechanism. The results replicated previous findings quite well; however, the true and error model indicated that very few, if any, participants exhibited true intransitive preferences. In addition, violations of stochastic dominance showed a strong and systematic decrease in prevalence over time and violated response independence, thus violating key assumptions of standard random preference models for analysis of transitivity.

a b s t r a c tWe present an experiment designed to study the psychological basis for the willingness to accept (WTA)-willingness to pay (WTP) gap. Specifically, we conduct a standard WTA-WTP economic experiment to replicate the gap and include in it five additional instruments to try to follow the psychological processes producing it. These instruments are designed to measure five psychological constructs we consider especially relevant: (1) attitudes, (2) feelings, (3) familiarity with the target good, (4) risk attitudes, and (5) personality. Our results provide important new insights into the psychological foundations of the WTA-WTP disparity, which can be used to organize some major previous results and cast serious doubts on the claim that the gap might be just a consequence of inappropriate experimental practice.

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There is no evidence comparing head-to-head the effects of monetary incentives to act and to abstain from acting on behaviour. We present an experiment, conducted between June and September 2012, that directly compares the effects of those two different monetary incentive schemes on eating behaviour: we evaluate incentives to eat against incentives not to eat. A large number of participants (n = 353) had bowls of sweets next to them while they watched different videos over two experimental sessions that were two days apart. Sweets eating was monitored and monetary incentives to eat or not to eat were introduced during one of the videos for participants randomly allocated to these conditions. Our results show that, while both types of incentives were effective in changing sweets-eating behaviour when they were in place, only incentives not to eat had significant carryover effects after they were removed. Those effects were still significant two days after the monetary incentives had been eliminated. We also present some additional results on personality and health-related variables that shed further light on these effects. Overall, our study shows that incentives not to eat can be more effective in producing carryover effects on behaviour in domains like the one explored here.