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In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies

by Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis, Richard Mcelreath - American Economic Review , 2001
"... al behavior better explained statistically by individuals' attributes such as their sex, age, or relative wealth, or by the attributes of the group to which the individuals belong? Are there cultures that approximate the canonical account of self-regarding behavior? Existing research cannot an ..."
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al behavior better explained statistically by individuals' attributes such as their sex, age, or relative wealth, or by the attributes of the group to which the individuals belong? Are there cultures that approximate the canonical account of self-regarding behavior? Existing research cannot answer such questions because virtually all subjects have been university students, and while there are cultural differences among student populations throughout the world, these differences are small compared to the range of all social and cultural environments. To address the above questions, we and our collaborators undertook a large cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public good, and dictator games. Twelve experienced field researchers, working in 12 countries on five continents, recruited subjects from 15 small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. Our sample consists of three foraging societies, six that practice slash-and-burn horticulture
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Neuroeconomics: Using Neuroscience to Make Economic Predictions

by Colin F. Camerer, Div Hss - Hahn Lecture, Royal Economic Society, Nottingham UK, April , 2006
"... Tranel, Joseph Wang), to skeptics for forcing us to think harder and write more clearly about the enterprise, and to many neuroscientists (especially John Allman, Paul Glimcher, John O’Doherty and Read Montague) for tutoring and advice over the last few Neuroeconomics seeks to ground microeconomic t ..."
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Tranel, Joseph Wang), to skeptics for forcing us to think harder and write more clearly about the enterprise, and to many neuroscientists (especially John Allman, Paul Glimcher, John O’Doherty and Read Montague) for tutoring and advice over the last few Neuroeconomics seeks to ground microeconomic theory in details about how the brain works (see Zak, 2004; Camerer, Loewenstein and Prelec, 2005; Chorvat and McCabe, 2005; and Sanfey et al, 2006). Neuroeconomics is a subfield of behavioral economics (behavioral economics uses empirical evidence of limits on computation,
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Expressive behavior in economics and politics.

by Arye L Hillman , Nick Baigent , Frank Bohn , Michael Brooks , Amihai Glazer , Robert Gregory , Dror Goldberg , Joel Guttman , Alan Hamlin , Carsten Hefeker , Wilfred Ethier , Raphael Franck , Colin Jennings , Bryan Mccannon , Dennis Mueller , Vai-Lam Mui , Yew Oliver Landmann , Kwang Ng , Niklas Potrafke , Günther Schultze , William Shughart Ii , Heinrich Ursprung , Thierry Verdier , Mor Zahavi - European Journal of Political Economy, , 2010
"... Abstract Expressive behavior provides expressive utility by confirming identity. Aspects of identity are predetermined. I focus on attributes of identity that people choose, to be pleasing to themselves or pleasing to others. All people are expressive insofar as behavior is predicated on identity. ..."
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Abstract Expressive behavior provides expressive utility by confirming identity. Aspects of identity are predetermined. I focus on attributes of identity that people choose, to be pleasing to themselves or pleasing to others. All people are expressive insofar as behavior is predicated on identity. Expressive behavior can however be deceptive and can be the source of externalities. I use expressive voting to illustrate expressive behavior and generalize the model of expressive utility to behavior that I call expressive rhetoric and expressive generosity. Experimental evidence on expressive behavior and a reinterpretation of other experimental evidence reveals extensive prevalence of decisions predicated on expressive utility. Expressive behavior can coexist with altruism or malice. I enquire into remedies for the social costs of expressive behavior.
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Non-Welfarist Optimal Taxation and Behavioral Public Economics. CESifo Working Paper 1291

by Ravi Kanbur, Jukka Pirttilä, Matti Tuomala , 2004
"... Research in behavioral economics has uncovered the widespread phenomenon of people making decisions against their own good intentions. In these situations, the government might want to intervene, indeed individuals might want the government to intervene, to induce behavior that is closer to what ind ..."
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Research in behavioral economics has uncovered the widespread phenomenon of people making decisions against their own good intentions. In these situations, the government might want to intervene, indeed individuals might want the government to intervene, to induce behavior that is closer to what individual wish they were doing. The analysis of such corrective interventions, through taxes and subsidies, might be called ”behavioral public economics.” However, such analysis, where the government has an objective function that is different from that of individuals, is not new in public economics. In these cases the government is said to be ”non-welfarist ” in its objectives, and there is a long tradition of non-welfarist welfare economics, especially the analysis of optimal taxation and subsidy policy where the outcomes of individual behavior are evaluated using a preference function different from the one that generated the outcomes. The object of this paper is to first of all present a unified view of the non-welfarist optimal taxation literature and, secondly, to present behavioral public economics as a natural special case of this general framework. Key words: non-welfarism, optimal taxation, behavioral economics 1

The turn in recent economics and return of orthodoxy

by John B. Davis, John B. Davis - Cambridge Journal of Economics , 2008
"... This paper examines change on the economics research frontier, and asks whether the current competition between new research programs may be supplanted by a new single dominant approach in the future. The paper discusses whether economics tends to be dominated by a single approach or reflect a plura ..."
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This paper examines change on the economics research frontier, and asks whether the current competition between new research programs may be supplanted by a new single dominant approach in the future. The paper discusses whether economics tends to be dominated by a single approach or reflect a pluralism of approaches, and argues that historically it has alternated between the two. It argues that orthodoxy usually emerges from heterodoxy, and interprets the division between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in terms of a core-periphery distinction. Regarding recent economics, the paper maps out two different types of combinations of new research programs as being synchronic or diachronic in nature. It treats the new research programs as a new kind of heterodoxy, and asks how a new orthodoxy might arise out of this new heterodoxy and traditional heterodoxy. It discusses this question by advancing two views regarding how the two different types of combinations in the new research programs might consolidate along the lines of three shared commitments with traditional heterodoxy to form a new orthodoxy in economics.

Moral hazard, income taxation, and prospect theory

by Ravi Kanbur, Jukka Pirttilä, Ravi Kanbur, Jukka Pirttilä, Matti Tuomala , 2004
"... Tuomala It is the Policy of Cornell University actively to support equality of educational and employment opportunity. No person shall be denied admission to any educational program or activity or be denied employment on the basis of any legally prohibited discrimination involving, but not limited t ..."
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Tuomala It is the Policy of Cornell University actively to support equality of educational and employment opportunity. No person shall be denied admission to any educational program or activity or be denied employment on the basis of any legally prohibited discrimination involving, but not limited to, such factors as race, color, creed, religion, national or ethnic origin, sex, age or handicap. The University is committed to the maintenance of affirmative action programs which will assure the continuation of such equality of opportunity. MORAL HAZARD, INCOME TAXATION, AND PROSPECT THEORY * by

Discriminating among probability weighting functions using adaptive design optimization

by Daniel R. Cavagnaro, Mark A. Pitt, Richard Gonzalez, Jay I. Myung - Journal of Risk and Uncertainty , 2013
"... Probability weighting functions relate objective probabilities and their subjective weights, and play a central role in modeling choices under risk within cumulative prospect theory. While several different parametric forms have been proposed, their qualitative similarities make it challenging to di ..."
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Probability weighting functions relate objective probabilities and their subjective weights, and play a central role in modeling choices under risk within cumulative prospect theory. While several different parametric forms have been proposed, their qualitative similarities make it challenging to discriminate among them empirically. In this paper, we use both simulation and choice experiments to investigate the extent to which different parametric forms of the proba-bility weighting function can be discriminated using adaptive design optimization, a computer-based methodology that identifies and exploits model differences for the purpose of model dis-crimination. The simulation experiments show that the correct (data-generating) form can be conclusively discriminated from its competitors. The results of an empirical experiment reveal heterogeneity between participants in terms of the functional form, with two models (Prelec-2, Linear in Log Odds) emerging as the most common best-fitting models. The findings shed light on assumptions underlying these models.

Testing behavioral public economics theories

by James Alm - in the laboratory, National Tax Journal 63(4): 635–658 , 2010
"... “Behavioral economics, ” or the application of methods and evidence from other social sciences to economics, has increased greatly in signifi cance in the last two decades. An important method by which many of its predictions have been tested has been via laboratory experiments. In this paper I surv ..."
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“Behavioral economics, ” or the application of methods and evidence from other social sciences to economics, has increased greatly in signifi cance in the last two decades. An important method by which many of its predictions have been tested has been via laboratory experiments. In this paper I survey and assess experimental tests of various applications of behavioral economics to the specifi c area of public economics, or “behavioral public economics. ” I discuss the basic elements of be-havioral economics, the methodology of experimental economics, applications of experimental methods to behavioral public economics, and topics in which future applications should prove useful.

in the Built Environment

by Robert Kirkman, Douglas S. Noonan, Robert Kirkman, Douglas S. Noonan, Robert Kirkman, Douglas S. Noonan, I. Being Stuck
"... We seek here to lay the groundwork for a multi-disciplinary inquiry into one aspect of the phenomenology of moral experience, which is a general project of elucidating what it is like for people to make ethical decisions in particular contexts. Taking urban and suburban environments as the context f ..."
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We seek here to lay the groundwork for a multi-disciplinary inquiry into one aspect of the phenomenology of moral experience, which is a general project of elucidating what it is like for people to make ethical decisions in particular contexts. Taking urban and suburban environments as the context for decision making, we focus in particular on the common human experience of being stuck. Just as a person can get physically stuck while trying to crawl through a hole that is too small, people can get ethically stuck when some feature of their relationship with their context blocks or deflects their efforts to make good decisions and to do the right thing. We develop a preliminary typology of stuckness for ordinary residents of urban and suburban environments, and suggest ways in which various disciplinary perspectives might be brought to bear on each type. We close by looking ahead to two possible extensions of inquiry into stuckness: a consideration of how people and groups who have some power in shaping the built environment (e.g., developers, planners) may be stuck, and a consideration of when and under what circumstances people might get unstuck. On Being Stuck: Looking for the Limits of Ethics
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Turn in and Return of Orthodoxy in Recent Economics

by John B. Davis
"... This paper examines change on the economics research frontier, and asks whether the current competition between new research programs may be supplanted by a new single dominant approach in the future. The paper discusses whether economics tends to be dominated by a single approach or reflect a plura ..."
Abstract - Cited by 1 (0 self) - Add to MetaCart
This paper examines change on the economics research frontier, and asks whether the current competition between new research programs may be supplanted by a new single dominant approach in the future. The paper discusses whether economics tends to be dominated by a single approach or reflect a pluralism of approaches, and argues that historically it has alternated between the two. It argues that orthodoxy usually emerges from heterodoxy, and interprets the division between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in terms of a core-periphery distinction. Regarding recent economics, the paper maps out two different types of combinations of new research programs as being synchronic or diachronic in nature. It treats the new research programs as a new kind of heterodoxy, and asks how a new orthodoxy might arise out of this new heterodoxy and traditional heterodoxy. It discusses this question by advancing two views regarding how the two different types of combinations in the new research programs might consolidate along the lines of three shared commitments with traditional heterodoxy to form a new orthodoxy in economics.