We study experimentally the protection of property in five widely distinct countries-Austria, Mexico, Mongolia, South Korea and the United States. Our main results are that the security of property varies with experimental institutions, and that our subject pools exhibit significantly different behaviors that correlate with country-level property security, trust and quality of government. Subjects from countries with higher levels of trust or perceptions of safety are more prone to abstain initially from theft and devote more resources to production, and subjects from countries with higher quality political institutions are more supportive of protecting property through compulsory taxation. This highlights the relevance of sociopolitical factors in determining countries' success in addressing collective action problems including safeguarding property rights.
This article contributes to the literature on trust and small businesses in developing countries by linking the level of trust in others that entrepreneurs display in a lab setting to sales data outside of the lab. The results show a robust positive correlation between trust and business success (with sales used as a measure of success): The successful entrepreneurs invested in trust more than the less successful ones did. In the lab, trusting in others is highly profitable, with successful entrepreneurs doing so to the degree required to maximize revenue. However, I found no association between trustworthiness and business success. (JEL O17, L26, C91)
The importance of cooperative behavior in business environments has been theorized in the field of management. However, measuring cooperation quantitatively is often challenging. We take advantage of experimental methods to overcome this issue. Particularly, we study the decisions that small‐scale entrepreneurs in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, make in a laboratory property rights dilemma experiment, comparing these to the decisions of student counterparts in the same and other countries, and looking for correlations between lab decisions and success in real‐world business sales. We find that Mongolian entrepreneurs generally achieve much higher cooperation levels and hence higher experimental earnings than Mongolian students. Also, among individual participants, producing and desisting from theft in the lab setting is correlated at the 1% level with real‐world business sales. Our findings align with the view that cooperative impulses or abidance of social norms can be an advantage in business relationships.
Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Abstract. We study a laboratory social dilemma game in which incentives to steal from others lead to the socially inefficient diversion of resources from production unless the members of a given minisociety can abide by norms of non-theft or engage in low cost collective protection of their members' wealth accumulations. We compare two treatments in which subjects have opportunities to exchange free-form messages to one without such opportunities, finding that most subjects allocate far less to theft and most groups achieve much greater efficiency in the presence of communication. Ease of identifying who has engaged in theft varies across the two communication treatments, but is of minor importance to the outcome. We find several coding-amenable elements of message content to be statistically significant predictors of group and individual outcomes. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may
We study the effects of price matching in a setting in which each firm selects both its price and output, simultaneously. We show that the availability of a price-matching option leads to the Cournot outcome in this setting. Our experimental study confirms this result in the laboratory. Our finding is a stark contrast to the one obtained in the standard price competition that the most likely market price in the presence of a price-matching option is the monopolistic price. In addition, we show that price matching benefits consumers in markets with a large number of firms. If a market has a few firms, then the effects of price matching on consumers depend on the market demand and cost functions. Thus, our study suggests that the effect of price matching depends on the strategic variables of the firms. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2788 . This paper was accepted by Eric Anderson, marketing.
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