behavioral economics

Effort Transparency and Fairness Published at Public Choice

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

Please see my latest paper, out at Public Choice: Effort transparency and fairness

The published version is better, but you can find our old working paper at SSRN “Effort Transparency and Fairness”

Abstract: We study how transparent information about effort impacts the allocation of earnings in a dictator game experiment. We manipulate information about the respective contributions to a joint endowment that a dictator can keep or share with a counterpart…

Employees within an organization are sensitive to whether they are being treated fairly. Greater organizational fairness is shown to improve job satisfaction, reduce employee turnover, and boost the organization’s reputation. To study how transparent information impacts fairness perceptions, we conduct a dictator game with a jointly earned endowment. 

The endowment is earned by completing a real effort task in the experiment, an analog to the labor employees contribute to employers. First, two players work independently to create a pool of money. Then, the subject assigned the role of the “dictator” allocates the final earnings between them.

In the transparent treatment, both dictators and recipients have access to complete information about their own effort levels and contributions, as well as those of their counterparts. In the non-transparent treatment, dictators have full information about the relative contributions of both players, but recipients do not know how much each person contributed to the endowment. The two treatments allow us to compare the behaviors of dictators who know they could be judged and held to reciprocity norms with dictators who do not face the same level of scrutiny.

*drumroll* results:

This graph shows the amount of money the dictators take from the recipient contribution, in cents.  There are two ways to look at this. Notice the spike next to zero. Most dictators do not take much from what their counterpart earned. They are *dictators*, meaning they could take everything. Most take almost nothing, regardless of the treatment. We interpret this to mean that they are acting out of a sense of fairness, and we apply a humanomics framework to explain this in the paper.

Also, there is significantly more taken in non-transparency. When the worker does not have good information on the meritocratic outcome, then some dictators feel like they can get away with taking more. Some of this happens through what we call “shading down” of the amount sent by the dictator under the cover of non-transparency.

There is more in the paper, but the last thing I’ll point out here is that the “worker” subjects (recipients) anticipate that this will happen. The recipients forecast that the dictator would take more under non-transparency. In our conclusion, we mention that, even though the dictator seems to be at an advantage in a non-transparent environment, the dictator still might choose a transparency policy if it affects which workers select into the team.

View and download your article*   This hyperlink is good for a limited number of free downloads of my paper with Demiral and Saglam, says Springer the publisher. Please don’t waste it, but if you want the article I might as well put it out there. I posted this on 11/2/2024, so there is no guarantee that the link will work for you.

Cite our article: Buchanan, J., Demiral, E.E. & Sağlam, Ü. Effort transparency and fairness. Public Choice (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-024-01230-9

Sticky Prices as Coordination Failure Working Paper

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

“Sticky Prices as Coordination Failure: An Experimental Investigation” is my new paper with David Munro of Middlebury, up at SSRN.

We ask whether coordination failures are a source of nominal rigidities. This was suggested in a recent speech by ECB President Christine Lagarde. She said, “In the recent decades of low inflation, firms that faced relative price increases often feared to raise prices and lose market share. But this changed during the pandemic as firms faced large, common shocks, which acted as an implicit coordination mechanism vis-à-vis their competitors.”

Coordination failure was suggested as a possible cause of price rigidity in a theory paper by Ball and Romer (1991). They demonstrated the possibility for multiple equilibria, and we perform the first laboratory test to observe equilibrium selection in this environment.

We theoretically solve a monopolistically competitive pricing game and show that a range of multiple equilibria emerges when there are price adjustment costs (menu costs). We explore equilibrium selection in laboratory price setting games with two treatments: one without menu costs where price adjustment is always an equilibrium, and one with menu costs where both rigidity and flexibility are possible equilibria.

In plain language, for our general audience, the idea is that the prices you set might depend on what other people are doing. If other people are responding to a shock (for example, Covid driving up labor costs all over town might cause retail prices to rise) then you will, too. If every other store in town is afraid to raise prices, then there is a certain situation where you might resist adjusting your prices, too (price rigidity).

Results: First, when there is only one theoretical equilibrium, subjects usually conform to it. When cost shocks are large, price adjustment is a unique equilibrium regardless of the presence of menu costs, and we see that subjects almost always adjust prices. When cost shocks are small and there are menu costs rigidity is a unique equilibrium and subjects almost never adjust. Conversely, with small cost shocks subjects almost always adjust when there are no menu costs.

The more interesting cases are when the parameters allow for either rigidity or flexibility to be selected. We find that groups do not settle at the rigidity equilibrium. Rather, depending on the specific nature of the shock, between half and 80% of subjects adjust in response to a shock. The intermediate levels of adjustment are represented here in this figure as the red circles that fall between the red and green bands where multiple equilibria are possible.

In the figure above, the red circles are higher when the production cost shock gets further from zero in absolute value. We see that the proportion of subjects adjusting prices is proportional to the size of the cost shocks. This is consistent with the interpretation that the large post-COVID cost shocks acted as an implicit coordination mechanism for firms raising prices. Our results provide a number of interesting insights on nominal rigidities. We document more nuance in the paper regarding heterogeneity and asymmetry. Comments and feedback are appreciated! If it’s not clear from the EWED blog how to email me (Joy), find my professional contact info here. 

Purchasing Drinks with Push-ups.

Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

Early in the summer of 2021, I was having fun. The semester was ended and traveling was on the horizon. Due to changes at my wife’s job I began driving to work instead of making the 20 minute trek by foot. And there was plenty of time to be social. And social I was — several days of the week. And, inevitably, drinks would be served. I was doing a lot less walking and a lot more drinking alcohol (responsibly).

I was footloose and fancy free. Until… The bathroom scale reminded me that I had surpassed the age of 30 years old. Being sedentary and drinking were starting to add up.

Right then and there, I made a decision. I would disincentivize my drinking, but I would also make drinking beneficial rather than detrimental to my waist line.

I made a deal with myself. For each drink that I had, I would have to ‘pay’ 25 push-ups. No exceptions. And, no borrowing from myself. Push-ups *had* to come first. None of this “I owe myself push-ups” nonsense (it’s a trap!). I could *save* for the future, however. Knowing that a social event was approaching, I’d build myself a nice little balance. And the exchange rate was constant: 25 push-ups per drink – always.

Who held me accountable? Me, myself, and I… And some incentive compatible approbation.

I wasn’t shy about any of it. At a outdoor beer garden with my wife and her cousin, I had prepared by banking 50 push-ups. But round 3 was impending… and I’m no square. So, over to the side, quite out of the way on the outdoor patio, I knocked out a quick 25. Round 4 came after still another 25.

Now let’s talk incentives. Requiring push-ups of myself increased my physical activity, so I felt better about my body. Further, if I hadn’t banked push-ups ahead of time, paying prior to each drink limited how many push-ups I could comfortably do. Once push-ups became uncomfortable, I stopped drinking.

That’s all great. But the social incentives were pivotal in keeping me dedicated. Upon seeing the push-ups in action, female friends would talk to my wife who quickly developed a well-crafted dialogue for each new observer, complete with convincingly spontaneous gesticulations and eye-rolls. I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy the attention.

Other men provided direct positive approval. I combined 3 activities that were already ‘manly’ when separate: muscle building, drinking, and dispassionate self control. Men would praise me immediately and similarly feel compelled to do there own sets of push-ups in my presence — as if being sedentary in my presence convicted them as guilty of something. At least one wife sent me a text after we had left town that included a picture of her husband knocking out some of his own pre-drink push-ups (Is this what it feels like to be an influencer??).

Aristotle would be proud.

I was very consistent for months. Being the summer and seeing a lot of friends and family, I did a lot of push-ups. But, as time passed, the exercise habit stuck even as the drinking began to pass by the wayside. What began as an arbitrary, self-imposed rule soon became a legit change in behavior. And then, that change in behavior became a practice. Did that practice improve my temperance and fortitude through habituation? Idk. But wouldn’t that be nice?