Luca Panaccione

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.

Financial Literacy and Bank Runs: An Experimental Analysis

We set up an experimental coordination game among bank depositors a la Diamond and Dybvig (1983). We elicit subjects’ financial literacy and study the impact of revealing this information on the coordination problem typical of this game with multiple equilibria. We find that when no information is revealed the likelihood of runs increases with bank size, while when information on financial literacy is disclosed it increases in small banks and decreases in large ones. Over all banks’ dimensions, the probability of coordinating on the inefficient equilibrium is lower when the average financial literacy revealed to the group is higher.

Voluntary Cooperation in Local Public Goods Provision – An Experimental Study

In a circular neighborhood with each member having a left and a right neighbor, individuals choose two contribution levels, one each for the public good shared with the left, respectively right, neighbor. This allows for general free riders, who do not contribute at all, and general cooperators, who contribute to both local public goods, as well as for differentiating contributors who contribute in a discriminatory way. Although the two-person local public good games are structurally independent, we investigate whether intra- as well as inter-personal spillover effects arise. We find that participants do not behave as if they are playing two separate public good games, hence that both inter-personal and intra-personal behavioral spillovers occur. To investigate more clearly motives for voluntary cooperation via analyzing individual adaptations in playing two structurally independent games, we design treatments differing in cooperation incentives (i.e. different MPCR) and structural (a)symmetry of local public goods. We find that when the MPCR is asymmetric, free-riding occurs less, and contributions are more stable over time. We also find that contributions in the asymmetric treatment when MPCR is low are higher than contributions in symmetric treatments with higher MPCR.

A Proof Without Words and a Maximum Without Calculus

We define a standard optimization problem with quadratic objective function and provide a rigorous visual proof for its solution without using calculus. We then show that such standard problem is a building block for several economic models related to microeconomics, game theory and pricing strategies.