Boris Maciejovsky

Risk Attitude and Market Behavior: Evidence from Experimental Asset Markets

In this paper we relate individual risk attitude as elicited by binary lottery choices to market behavior. By analyzing 26 independent experimental markets with a total of 280 participants, we show that binary lottery choices are systematically correlated with market behavior: the higher the degree of risk aversion the lower the observed market activity. Our results also uncover gender differences in risk attitude, which moderate market behavior. We find that women are more risk averse than men, submit fewer offers, and engage less often in trades.

Overconfidence in Investment Decisions: An Experimental Approach

Abstract By experimentally inducing risk aversion, overconfidence in an investment setting is investigated, comparing the evaluation of actual investment decisions with alternative choices. After selecting their own investment, subjects confront three alternative investment choices, including the optimal one, and are asked about their willingness to pay and to substitute their own for alternative choices. Overconfidence is defined as the persistent overevaluation of the own investment decision. Results indicate that overconfidence increases (i) with the absolute deviation from optimal choices, (ii) with task complexity involving the number of risky assets, and (iii) decreases with individual perceived uncertainty.

Collective Induction Without Cooperation? Learning and Knowledge Transfer in Cooperative Groups and Competitive Auctions

There is strong evidence that groups perform better than individuals do on intellective tasks with demonstrably correct solutions. Typically, these studies assume that group members share common goals. The authors extend this line of research by replacing standard face-to-face group interactions with competitive auctions, allowing for conflicting individual incentives. In a series of studies involving the well-known Wason selection task, they demonstrate that competitive auctions induce learning effects equally impressive as those of standard group interactions, and they uncover specific and general knowledge transfers from these institutions to new reasoning problems. The authors identify payoff feedback and information pooling as the driving factors underlying these findings, and they explain these factors within the theoretical framework of collective induction.

Teams Make You Smarter: How Exposure to Teams Improves Individual Decisions in Probability and Reasoning Tasks

Many important decisions are routinely made by transient and temporary teams, which perform their duty and disperse. Team members often continue making similar decisions as individuals. We study how the experience of team decision making affects subsequent individual decisions in two seminal probability and reasoning tasks, the Monty Hall problem and the Wason selection task. Both tasks are hard and involve a general rule, thus allowing for knowledge transfers, and can be embedded in the context of markets that offer identical incentives to teams and individuals. Our results show that teams trade closer to the rational level, learn the solution faster, and achieve this with weaker, less specific performance feedback than individuals. Most importantly, we observe significant knowledge transfers from team decision making to subsequent individual performances that take place up to five weeks later, indicating that exposure to team decision making has strong positive spillovers on the quality of individual decisions. This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.

Research Note---The Researcher as a Consumer of Scientific Publications: How Do Name-Ordering Conventions Affect Inferences About Contribution Credits?

When researchers from different fields with different norms collaborate, the question arises of how name-ordering conventions are chosen and how they affect contribution credits. In this paper, we answer these questions by studying two disciplines that exemplify the two cornerstones of name-ordering conventions: lexicographical ordering (i.e., alphabetical ordering, endorsed in economics) and nonlexicographical ordering (i.e., ordering according to individual contributions, endorsed in psychology). Inferences about credits are unambiguous in the latter arrangement but imperfect in the former, because alphabetical listing can reflect ordering according to individual contributions by chance. n nWe contrast the fields of economics and psychology with marketing, a discipline heavily influenced by both. Based on archival data, consisting of more than 38,000 journal articles, we show that the three fields have different ordering practices. In two empirical studies with 351 faculty and graduate student participants from all three disciplines, as well as in a computer simulation, we show that ordering practices systematically affect and shape the allocation of perceived contributions and credit. Whereas strong disciplinary norms in economics and psychology govern the allocation of contribution credits, a more heterogeneous picture emerges for marketing. This lack of strong norms has detrimental effects in terms of assigned contribution credits.

The Effect of Payoff Feedback and Information Pooling on Reasoning Errors: Evidence from Experimental Markets

Avast literature shows that individuals frequently violate normative principles in reasoning. In this paper, we report the results of four studies designed to determine if information dissemination in competitive auctions can reduce, or even eliminate, logical errors in the Wason selection task. Our results show that payoff feedback and exposure to the information flow drive the aggregate behavior toward the normative solution. We also found evidence of spillover effects from informed to uninformed traders in one-sided combinatorial auctions, as well as positive transfer effects from competitive to individual settings.

Costs of Implementation: Bargaining Costs versus Allocative Efficiency

A mechanism with low direct cost of use may be preferred to alternatives implementing more efficient allocations. We show this experimentally by giving pairs of subjects the option to agree on a single average price for a sequence of trades--in effect pooling several small bargains into a larger one. We make pooling costly by tying it to some inefficient trades, but subjects nevertheless reveal strong tendencies to pool, particularly when more bargains remain to be struck and when bargaining is face to face. The results suggest that implementation costs could play a significant role in the use of many common trading practices.

Mental Accounting and the Impact of Tax Penalty and Audit Frequency on the Declaration of Income

We investigate (i) whether traders on an experimental asset market form different and separate mental accounts for sale revenues and for dividend earnings and whether (ii) an increase in tax penalty or (iii) an increase in audit frequency increases tax compliance. The results indicate that participants did not form separate mental accounts for sale revenues and for dividend earnings. However in line with prospect theory, it can be shown that a purchase of assets is perceived as a subjective loss that one tries to repair by risk seeking behavior. Participants who increased their net asset holdings declared less income to the tax authorities. Furthermore, the results indicate that an increase in tax penalties as well as an increase in audit frequency increased compliance. In addition, it was found that tax compliance was lower after an audit, especially after the first audit, and that it was lower for participants with high incomes.