We run an experiment to study the effects of Covid-19 lockdown in Italy on preferences for fairness and cooperation. Given the impossibility of having participants in the lab during the lockdown, we adopted an online methodology based on a multi-platform architecture that brings experimental subjects in a “Lab on the Web”. Results from standard Ultimatum and linear Public Good games show that the circumstances in which participants lived the lockdown significantly affect their behavior in the two games. In particular, participants are more selfish in the ultimatum bargaining and contribute more to the public good when social isolation is stronger. However, cooperation decreases when lockdown is longer. We interpret these results as evidence of “social embeddedness” to compensate for “social distancing”.
Potentially dynamically-inconsistent individuals create particular problems for economics, as their behaviour depends upon whether and how they attempt to resolve their potential inconsistency. In this article we report on the results of a new experiment designed to help us distinguish between the different types that may exist and that we classify in myopic, naïve, resolute and sophisticated. We implement a new experimental design in which subjects are asked to take two sequential decisions (interspersed by a random move by Nature) concerning the allocation of a given sum of money. The resulting data allows us to classify the subjects. We find that the majority are resolute, a significant few are sophisticated, rather few are naïve and similarly few are myopic
Laboratory experiments have been often replaced by online experiments in the last decade. This trend has been reinforced when academic and research work based on physical interaction had to be suspended due to restrictions imposed to limit the spread of Covid-19. Therefore, data quality and results from web experiments have become an issue which is currently investigated. Are there significant differences between lab experiments and online findings? We contribute to this debate via an experiment aimed at comparing results from a novel online protocol with traditional laboratory settings, using the same pool of participants. We find that participants in our experiment behave in a similar way across settings and that there are at best weakly significant and quantitatively small differences in behavior observed using our online protocol and physical laboratory setting.
Supplementary Information
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40881-021-00114-8.
While the paradigm of utility maximisation has formed the basis of the majority of applications in discrete choice modelling for over 40 years, its core assumptions have been questioned by work in both behavioural economics and mathematical psychology as well as more recently by developments in the RUM-oriented choice modelling community. This paper reviews the basic properties with a view to explaining the historical pre-eminence of utility maximisation and addresses the question of what departures from the paradigm may be necessary or wise in order to accommodate richer behavioural patterns. We find that many, though not all, of the behavioural traits discussed in the literature can be approximated sufficiently closely by a random utility framework, allowing analysts to retain the many advantages that such an approach possesses.
In this paper we propose a mainstream reformulation of the original Walras’ model of capital accumulation. First, we prove the existence of intertemporal competitive equilibria. Our proof combines a well known theorem due to Yannelis and Prabhakar (J Math Econ 12:233–245, 1983) with a lemma due to Geanakoplos (Econ Theory 21:585–603, 2003). Moreover, we remedy the indeterminacy of allocation of savings across multiple types of capital goods by introducing a storage technology. Finally, we show that, for stored capital goods, the equality of rates of returns emerges endogenously in equilibrium, while it was imposed by Walras from the outset in his original contribution
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