Anders Poulsen

Gender Matching And Competitiveness: Experimental Evidence

This paper experimentally investigates if and how peoples competitiveness depends on their own gender and on the gender of people with whom they interact. Participants are given information about the gender of the co-participant they are matched with, they then choose between a tournament or a piece rate payment scheme, and finally perform a real task. As already observed in the literature, we find that significantly more men than women choose the tournament. The gender of the co-participant directly influences mens choices (men compete less against other men than against women), but only when the gender information is made sufficiently salient. A higher predicted competitiveness of women induces more competition. Giving stronger tournament incentives, or allowing the participants to choose the gender of their co-participant, increases womens willingness to compete, but does not close the gender gap in competitiveness.

Feedback and Incentives: Experimental Evidence

This paper experimentally investigates the impact of different pay and relative performance information policies on employee effort. We explore three information policies: No feedback about relative performance, feedback given halfway through the production period, and continuously updated feedback. The pay schemes are a piece rate payment scheme and a winner-takes-all tournament. We find that, regardless of the pay scheme used, feedback does not improve performance. There are no significant peer effects in the piece-rate pay scheme. In contrast, in the tournament scheme we find some evidence of positive peer effects since the underdogs almost never quit the competition even when lagging significantly behind, and frontrunners do not slack off. Moreover, in both pay schemes information feedback reduces the quality of the low performers work.

Male and Female Competitive Behavior: Experimental Evidence

Male and female choices differ in many economic situations, e.g., on the labor market. This paper considers whether such differences are driven by different attitudes towards competition. In our experiment subjects choose between a tournament and a piece-rate pay scheme before performing a real task. Men choose the tournament significantly more often than women. Women are mainly influenced by their degree of risk aversion, but men are not. Men compete more against men than against women, but compete against women who are thought to compete. The behavior of men seems primarily to be influenced by social norms whose nature and origin we discuss.

Do people make strategic commitments? Experimental evidence on strategic information avoidance

Game theory predicts that players make strategic commitments that may appear counter-intuitive. We conducted an experiment to see if people make a counter-intuitive but strategically optimal decision to avoid information. The experiment is based on a sequential Nash demand game in which a responding player can commit ahead of the game not to see what a proposing player demanded. Our data show that subjects do, but only after substantial time, learn to make the optimal strategic commitment. We find only weak evidence of physical timing effects.

Endogenous Preferences and Social-Dilemma Institutions

There is robust experimental evidence that some people have selfish preferences, and others have social, or other-regarding, preferences. This paper seeks to explain why there is such preference heterogeneity. In our approach preferences are endogenous to the economys institutional setup. We consider institutions of the social-dilemma type. Our main result characterizes the endogenous preferences: There is, under a wide set of institutional setups, a unique endogenous preference distribution, where reciprocal, altruistic, and selfish preferences coexist. These results may contribute to understanding how institutions affect preferences.

Efficiency Versus Equality in Bargaining

We report experimental data from bargaining situations where bargainers can make proposals as often and whenever they want, and can communicate via written messages. We vary the set of feasible contracts, thereby allowing us to assess the focality of three properties of bargaining outcomes: equality, Pareto efficiency, and total earnings maximization. Our main findings are that subjects avoid an equal earnings contract if it is Pareto inefficient; a large proportion of bargaining pairs avoid equal and Pareto efficient contracts in favor of unequal and total earnings maximizing contracts, and this proportion increases when unequal contracts offer larger earnings to one of the players, even though this implies higher inequality. Finally, observed behavior violates the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives axiom, a result we attribute to a ‘compromise effect’. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Real time tacit bargaining, payoff focality, and coordination complexity: Experimental evidence

We conduct a bargaining experiment where interaction is tacit and payoffs are earned and cumulated in real time. We test hypotheses about the interaction between the focal properties of payoffs and the complexity of coordinating on an intertemporal behavior that achieves them. The general finding is that when a payoff focal outcome requires a complicated coordination scheme bargainers tend to settle on a simpler and sometimes inefficient behavior.

On efficiency, tie-breaking rules and role assignment procedures in evolutionary bargaining

We study a simple evolutionary bargaining game and show that the efficiency of bargaining behavior can depend crucially on the tie breaking rule players use. In fact, in a certain limit all the surplus is wasted. Inefficiency arises for any role assignment procedure, as long as there is some probability that two players are assigned to the same role. We also give results on the relationship between inefficiency and spitefulness.