Kei Tsutsui

An experiment on individual 'parochial altruism' revealing no connection between individual 'altruism' and individual 'parochialism'.

Is parochial altruism an attribute of individual behavior? This is the question we address with an experiment. We examine whether the individual pro-sociality that is revealed in the public goods and trust games when interacting with fellow group members helps predict individual parochialism, as measured by the in-group bias (i.e., the difference in these games in pro-sociality when interacting with own group members as compared with members of another group). We find that it is not. An examination of the Big-5 personality predictors of each behavior reinforces this result: they are different. In short, knowing how pro-social individuals are with respect to fellow group members does not help predict their parochialism.

Concession Bargaining:An Experimental Comparison of Protocols and Time Horizons

We test experimentally whether dynamic interaction is crucial for concession bargaining. In our complete information bargaining experiments, two parties with asymmetric conflict payoffs try to agree how to share a commonly known pie by bargaining over a finite number of successive trials (agreement attempts). We compare the fully dynamic interaction to one less dynamic and one static protocol. In the quasi-dynamic protocol, later trials merely reveal that so far no agreement has been reached, and in the static protocol, no feedback information is given about earlier trials. We find that neither conflict rate nor efficiency or inequality of agreements differs across protocols. Comparing different numbers of maximal trials shows that more trials render conflict more likely due to less concessions.

An Experiment on Democratic Versus Dictatorial Collective Decision Making

We report on an experiment that tests for the effects of democratic versus hierarchical rules for joint decision making in organizations, like companies, which operate in a competitive environment. While discussion improves outcomes via an effect on public goods contributions, we find that there is no difference between the decisions made under democracy and those made under hierarchy: an institutional version of the Modigliani-Miller theorem. The wisdom of crowd effect benefiting democratic organizations is counterbalanced by a greater attention paid by the manager in hierarchical organizations to the price decision, which we call the attention responsibility effect.