Arianna Galliera

Experience and Gender Effects in an Acquiring-a-Company Experiment Allowing for Value Messages

This paper focuses on a bargaining experiment in which the privately informed seller of a company sends a value message to the uninformed potential buyer who then proposes a price for acquiring the company. Participants are constantly in the role of either seller or buyer and interact over 30 rounds with randomly changing partners in the other role. We test how overstating the value of the company, underpricing the received value message and acceptance of price offers are affected by experience and gender (constellation). Like in our companion paper on single play (Di Cagno et al. 2015) we control via treatments for awareness of gender (constellation). One main hypothesis is that gender (constellation) matters but that the effects become weaker with more experience and that the main experience effects apply across gender (constellations).

Gender Differences in Yielding to Social Influence: An Impunity Experiment

In impunity games proposers, like allocators in dictator games, can take what they want; however, responders can refuse offers deemed unsatisfactory at own cost. We modify the impunity game via allowing offers to condition of another participant’s counterfactual generosity intention. For a given pair of proposer candidates each states, via the strategy vector method, an intended and two adjusted offers: one (possibly) upward adjusted in case the intended offer of the other candidate is higher and one (possibly) downward adjusted in case it is lower. Additionally, each candidate determines an acceptance threshold for the responder role. Only one candidate in each pair is randomly selected and endowed as the actual proposer whose offer is either possibly upward or downward adjusted depending on the counterfactual offer of the other proposer candidate. The endowed proposer of one pair is matched with the non-endowed candidate of another pair in the responder role. The data confirm that counterfactual intentions of others often affect own generosity via substantial and significant average adjustments to the weakest social influence. Overall, offers seem correlated with acceptance thresholds. Furthermore, we find significant gender differences: female participants state lower intended and adjusted offers as well as acceptance thresholds and therefore appear to be less sensitive to social influence.

Intention-based sharing

How are allocation results affected by information that another anonymous participant intends to be more or less generous? We explore this experimentally via two participants facing the same allocation task with only one actually giving after possible adjustment of own generosity based on the other’s intended generosity. Participants successively face three game types, the ultimatum, yes-no and impunity game, or (between subjects) in the reverse order. Although only the impunity game appeals to intrinsic generosity, we confirm conditioning even when sanctioning is possible. Based on our data, we distinguish two major types of participants in all three games: one yielding to the weakest social influence and the other immune to it and offering much less. This is particularly interesting in the impunity game where other-regarding concerns are minimal.

To Switch or Not to Switch Payment Scheme? Determinants and Effects in a Bargaining Game

The incentive scheme selected in a laboratory experiment might trigger different type of behavior in participants. This paper is an attempt to screen the strategies adopted by agents in a bargaining game when buyer and seller have partly conflicting interests and are asymmetrically informed. We allow participants to choose the incentive scheme through which they will be paid at the end of the experiment controlling for past experience and individual characteristics. It is well known that payment method is highly correlated to the risk preferences shown by individuals, but little research is devoted to the analysis of the behavior induced by Random Lottery Incentive scheme (RLI for short) and Cumulative Scheme payment (CS for short) both on individual and social results. This paper aims to fill the gap.