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Common sense is a dynamic concept and it is natural that our (statistical) common sense lags behind the development of statistical science. What is not so easy to understand is why common sense lags behind as much as it does. We conduct a survey among Japanese students and try to understand why some probabilistic and statistical questions that baffled great minds a few hundred years are now easy, while other (relatively straightforward) questions are not only difficult but even counter-intuitive.

This study experimentally evaluates the performance of partial equilibrium mechanisms when different sectors run their mechanisms separately, despite the existence of complementarity between them. In our simple laboratory experiment setting that includes two sectors, each sector runs the top-trading-cycle mechanism. There is a Pareto-dominant equilibrium, but it requires coordination across sectors. Our results show that coordination failure occurs more frequently when there is asymmetry between the two sectors compared with the one-sector benchmark, even without inter-sectoral complementarity. When mechanisms are run sequentially across the two sectors, such failure is substantially reduced, compared with when they are run simultaneously.

This version of the article has been accepted for publication, after peer review and is subject to Springer Nature’s AM terms of use, but is not the Version of Record and does not reflect post-acceptance improvements, or any corrections. The Version of Record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42973-019-00018-7, This paper discusses the relationships between the “measured” cognitive ability of participants and their behavior as observed during laboratory experiments. Based on such relationships, macroeconomic implications of micro-level “boundedly rational” individual behavior will be discussed. The paper also addresses potential problems that arise when insufficient attention is paid to large differences in the measured cognitive ability of participants across several experimental laboratories, influencing the replicability of existing experimental results but also the interpretation of results from cross-country experimental analyses, and proposes to complement participants’ database with individual characteristics.

International audience; We experimentally study the eect of the mode of digital communication on the emergence of trust in a principal-agent relationship. We consider three modes of communication that dier in the capacity to transmit nonverbal content: plain text, audio, and video. Communication is pre-play, one-way, and unrestricted, but its verbal content is homogenized across treatments. Overall, both audio and video messages have a positive (and similar) eect on trust as compared to plain text; however, the magnitude of these eects depends on the verbal content of agent's message (promise to act trustworthily vs. no such promise). In all conditions, we observe a positive eect of the agent's promise on the principal's trust. We also report that trust in female principals is sensitive to the availability of nonverbal cues about their partners.

The random Incentive System (RIS) is a standard method to incentivize participants in economic experiments. However, recent theoretical studies point out the possibility of its failure under ambiguity. We propose a modification of RIS, named independent RIS (I-RIS), to improve its reliability. We conducted an experiment to evaluate the performances of the standard RIS and I-RIS in direct and indirect manners. Whereas a nonnegligible fraction of participants are not consistent with the reversal-of-order axiom, a majority of ambiguity averse and seeking participants are. This implies that participants with nonneutral ambiguity attitudes may not report truthful preferences when RIS is used. However, randomization attitudes do not explain inconsistent choices under RIS. In addition, we did not find significant differences in performance between RIS and I-RIS. These results suggest that preferences for randomization, which is driven by nonneutral ambiguity attitudes, do not cause the failure of RIS.

Multiple Cournot oligopoly experiments found more collusive behavior in markets with fewer firms (Huck et al., 2004; Hostmann et al., 2018). This result could be explained by a higher difficulty to coordinate or by lower incentives to collude in markets with more firms. We show that the Quantal Response Equilibrium can explain how the change in incentives alone could result in more collusive output in smaller markets. We propose a new method to manipulate the group size while keeping constant the locations of key outcomes, payoffs at these outcomes and the incentives to collude. Experiments using this normalized payoff function find that the number of firms has no direct effect on the average output or profit. We conclude that higher rates of aggregate collusion in markets with fewer firms are driven by the changes in incentives or focality rather than purely the number of firms. These findings imply that antitrust policies aimed at preventing collusion should focus on incentives rather than on the market concentration.

We study the reaction of investors to tail events across trading institutions. We conduct experiments in which investors bid on a financial asset that delivers a small positive reward in more than 99% of the cases and a large loss otherwise. The baseline treatment uses a repeated BDM mechanism whereas the market treatment replaces the uniform draw of the BDM mechanism by a uniform draw over the bids of the other participants. Our design is such that bids should not differ across treatments in normal times while allowing for potential differences to emerge after tail events have occurred. We find that markets tend to exacerbate the reaction of investors to tail losses and we attribute this effect to emotions.

This study experimentally evaluates the performance of partial equilibrium mechanisms when different sectors run their mechanisms separately, despite the existence of complementarity between them. In our simple laboratory experiment setting that includes two sectors, each sector runs the top-trading-cycle mechanism. There is a Pareto-dominant equilibrium, but it requires coordination across sectors. Our results show that coordination failure occurs more frequently when there is asymmetry between the two sectors compared with the one-sector benchmark, even without inter-sectoral complementarity. When mechanisms are run sequentially across the two sectors, such failure is substantially reduced, compared with when they are run simultaneously.

In this paper, we reexamine a bias revealed by Kunz et al. (2017) regarding structured financial products known as barrier reverse convertibles (BRCs) with worst-of payout characteristics. Namely, using a nonincentivized survey of investor risk perceptions, Kunz et al. (2017) found that when safe assets are included with risky assets to provide the underlying assets of a BRC, investors erroneously perceive a lower risk for the BRC when in fact it becomes higher. We confirm the same bias among student participants using the results of an incentivized experiment. However, we do not observe any similar bias among finance professionals.

Perodaud Maxime, Hanaki Nobuyuki, Yamada Takashi. An experimental analysis of gender discrimination in a credence goods market. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 101853. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2022.101853., Field economic interactions always involve mutual knowledge about the distinctive personal characteristics of economic players. In particular, anecdotal evidence that female consumers being more likely defrauded in markets for car repair motivates the present study. In a design, we experimentally investigated how (i) displaying information about the counterpart’s gender and (ii) framing instructions that emphasize a specific car repair market context affect outcomes in markets for credence goods. A two-player game in four steps reproduced the conditions under which credence goods are provided. Overall, our analysis suggests that both market context and gender are of fundamental importance to explain the under-provision dimension of fraud in such markets.

International audience; To what extent is the observed mispricing in experimental asset markets caused by strategic uncertainty and by confusion? We address this question by comparing subjects' initial price forecasts in two market environments: one with six human traders, and the other with one human and five computer traders. We find that both strategic uncertainty and confusion contribute equally to the median initial forecast deviation from the fundamental value. The effect of strategic uncertainty is greater for subjects with a perfect score in the Cognitive Reflection Test, and it is not significant for those with low scores.

We experimentally study the effect of the mode of digital communication on the emergence of swift trust in a principal-agent relationship. We consider three modes of communication that differ in the capacity to transmit nonverbal content: plain text, audio, and video. Communication is pre-play, one-way, and unrestricted, but its verbal content is homogenized across treatments. Overall, both audio and video messages have a positive (and similar) effect on trust as compared to plain text; however, the magnitude of these effects depends on the verbal content of agent's message (promise to act trustworthily vs. no such promise). In all conditions, we observe a positive effect of the agent's promise on the principal's trust. We also report that trust in female principals is sensitive to the availability of nonverbal cues about interaction partners.

This paper aims to investigate the motives behind an intrinsic value of decision rights. Based on a series of experimental treatments conducted in France and Japan, we measure how much of such potential value stems from (i) a desire for independence from others, (ii) a desire for power, or (iii) a desire for self-reliance. We find that both Japanese and French subjects attach a significant intrinsic value to hold control. Surprisingly, we find that self-reliance is the only significant motive behind it in both countries.

International audience; We experimentally investigate how much value people put in observable information about others in strategic interactions. The incentivized experimental task is to predict an unknown target player's trustworthiness in an earlier hidden action game. In Experiment 1, we vary the source of information about the target player (neutral picture, neutral video, video containing strategic content). The observed prediction accuracy rates then serve as an empirical measure of the objective value of information. In Experiment 2, we elicit the subjective value of information using the standard stated preferences method (willingness to accept). While the elicited subjective values are ranked in the same manner as the objective ones, subjects attach value to information which does not help predict target behavior, and exaggerate the value of helpful information.

Recent works have shown how tail events could account for financial anomalies such as the equity premiumpuzzle. These models do not explore, however, why investors would discount tail risk so heavily. We take on this challenge by designing a novel tail-event experiment to assess both investors' behavioral and physiological reactions. We show that investors who observe the tail event without suffering losses tend to decrease their pricing of the asset subsequently. By contrast, loss-averse investors who suffer tail losses tend to increase their bids. This response is especially pronounced for those who exhibit a strong emotional response to tail losses. This demonstrates the key role played by emotions in influencing investors' response to tail events. Finally, investors who exhibit high anticipatory arousal, as measured with electrodermal activity, posted lower bids and were less likely to suffer tail losses and go bankrupt. They also achieved higher earnings when tail events occurred frequently. This finding contrasts with the common view that investors should silence their emotions.

International audience; By employing binary committee choice problems, this paper investigates how varying or eliminating feedback about payoffs affects: (1) subjects' learning about the underlying relationship between their nominal voting weights and their expected payoffs in weighted voting games; and (2) the transfer of acquired learning from one committee choice problem to a similar but different problem. In the experiment, subjects choose to join one of two committees (weighted voting games) and obtain a payoff stochastically determined by a voting theory. We found that: (i) subjects learned to choose the committee that generates a higher expected payoff even without feedback about the payoffs they received; and (ii) there was statistically significant evidence of ``meaningful learning'' (transfer of learning) only for the treatment with no payoff-related feedback. This finding calls for re-thinking existing models of learning to incorporate some type of introspection.

We experimentally study the effect of the mode of digital communication on the emergence of swift trust in a principal-agent relationship. We consider three modes of communication: plain text, audio, and video. Communication is pre-play, one-way, and unrestricted, but its content is homogenized across treatments. Overall, both audio and video messages have a positive (and similar) effect on trust compared to plain text; however, the magnitude of these effects depends on the content of agent's message (promise to act trustworthily vs. no such promise). In all conditions, we observe a positive effect of the agent's promise on the principal's trust. We also find that providing visual cues about the sender promotes trust and helps overcome gender favoritism in females.

International audience; This paper studies the influence of allowing borrowing and short selling on market prices and traders’ forecasts in an experimental asset market. We verify, although not statistically significantly so, that borrowing tends to increase asset overvaluation and price orecasts, while short selling tends to reduce these measures. We also show that a number of results on beliefs, traders’ types, cognitive sophistication, and earnings obtained in earlier experimental studies in which borrowing and short selling are not possible, generalize to markets with borrowing and short sales.

WEHIA (Workshop on Economic Science with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents) has celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2015 by promoting the adoption of a complex evolving system paradigm in economics. See, among others, Hommes (2013) and Kirman (2011) for recent surveys of such an approach in economics. It has also encouraged critical debates about the usefulness and the scientific achievements of this approach for the analysis of economic and social issues. [First paragraph]

We study the interaction of the effects of the strategic environment and communication on the observed levels of cooperation in two-person finitely repeated games with a Pareto-inefficient Nash equilibrium. We replicate previous findings that point to higher levels of tacit cooperation under strategic complementarity compared to strategic substitution. We find that this is not due to differences in levels of reciprocity as previously suggested. Instead, we find that slow learning coupled with noisy choices might drive this effect. When subjects are allowed to communicate in free-form online chat before making choices, cooperation levels increase significantly to the extent that the difference between strategic complements and substitutes disappears. A machine-assisted natural language processing approach shows how the content of communication is dependent on the strategic environment and cooperative behavior. In particular, we find that subjects in complementarity games reach full cooperation by agreeing on gradual moves towards it.

Recent experimental studies have shown that observed outcomes deviate significantly morefrom the Nash equilibrium when actions are strategic complements than when they are strategic substitutes. This "strategic environment effect" offers promising insights into the aggregate consequences of interactions among heterogeneous boundedly rational agents, but its macroeconomic implications have been questioned because the underlying experiments involve a small number of agents. We studied beauty contest games with a unique interior Nash equilibrium to determine the critical group size for triggering the strategic environment effect, and we use both theory and experiments to shed light on its effectiveness. Based on cognitive hierarchy and level-K models, we show theoretically that the effect is operative for interactions among three or more agents. Our experimental results show a statistically significant strategic environment effect for groups of five or more agents, establishing its robustness against the increase in the population size. Our results bolster other experimental ndings on the strategic environment effects that are relevant for macroeconomic issues such as price fluctuations and nominal rigidity.

Information sharing in competitive environments may seem counterintuitive, yet it is widely observed in humans and other animals. For instance, the open-source software movement has led to new and valuable technologies being released publicly to facilitate broader collaboration and further innovation. What drives this behavior and under which conditions can it be beneficial for an individual? Using simulations in both static and dynamic environments, we show that sharing information can lead to individual benefits through the mechanisms of pseudo-reciprocity, whereby shared information leads to by-product benefits for an individual without the need for explicit reciprocation. Crucially, imitation with a certain level of innovation is required to avoid a tragedy of the commons, while the mechanism of a local visibility radius allows for the coordination of self-organizing collectives of agents. When these two mechanisms are present, we find robust evidence for the benefits of sharing—even when others do not reciprocate.