Luis Miller

Moral Distance and Moral Motivations in Dictator Games

We perform an experimenta linvestigation using a dictator game in which individuals must make a moral decision - to give or not to give an amount of money to poor people in the Third World. A questionnaire in which the subjects are asked about the reasons for their decision shows that, at least in this case, moral motivations carry a heavy weight in the decision: the majority of dictators give the money for reasons of a consequentialist nature. Based on the results presented here and of other analogous experiments, we conclude that dicator behavior can be understood in terms of moral distance rather than social distance and that it systematically deviates from the egoism assumption in economic models and game theory.

Whose Impartiality? An Experimental Study Of Veiled Stakeholders, Involved Spectators And Detached Observers

We present an experiment designed to investigate three different mechanisms to achieve impartiality in distributive justice. We consider a first-person procedure, inspired by the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, and two third-party procedures, an involved spectator and a detached observer. First-person veiled stakeholders and involved spectators are affected by an initially unfair distribution that, in the stakeholders’ case, is to be redressed. We find substantial differences in the redressing task. Detached observers propose significantly fairer redistributions than veiled stakeholders or involved spectators. Risk preferences partly explain why veiled stakeholders propose less egalitarian redistributions. Surprisingly, involved spectators, who are informed about their position in society, tend to favour stakeholders holding the same position as they do after the initial distribution.

Moral consequences of becoming unemployed.

Significance Unemployment has devastating effects on people’s economic and social circumstances. Its negative effects on mental health and subjective well-being are also well documented. However, until now, there has been no quantitative evaluation of the moral consequences of unemployment. Here, using behavioral experiments and an unusual subject engagement strategy, we present evidence that becoming unemployed erodes the extent to which a person acknowledges earned entitlement, i.e., acknowledges an individual’s right to that gained through his or her own effort or endeavor. This finding has important implications for the way we should think about economic and political systems. It indicates that, in addition to a causal link running from preferences to outcomes, there exists a feedback loop from outcomes to preferences that needs to be taken into account when considering system dynamics. We test the conjecture that becoming unemployed erodes the extent to which a person acknowledges earned entitlement. We use behavioral experiments to generate incentive-compatible measures of individuals’ tendencies to acknowledge earned entitlement and incorporate these experiments in a two-stage study. In the first stage, participants’ acknowledgment of earned entitlement was measured by engaging them in the behavioral experiments, and their individual employment status and other relevant socioeconomic characteristics were recorded. In the second stage, a year later, the process was repeated using the same instruments. The combination of the experimentally generated data and the longitudinal design allows us to investigate our conjecture using a difference-in-difference approach, while ruling out the pure self-interest confound. We report evidence consistent with a large, negative effect of becoming unemployed on the acknowledgment of earned entitlement.

'The Devil is in the Details' - Sex Differences in Simple Bargaining Games

The study of gender differences in social preferences has shown mixed results, preventing economists and other social scientists from drawing definitive conclusions on this topic. Several original investigations and experimental reviews have hypothesized that the main reason of this heterogeneity of results is the myriad of experimental designs used to study gender differences. In this paper we test this hypothesis by making male and female participants to face two different but related experimental games and two different information treatments. Through this 2x2 factorial design, we obtain results in line with some recent papers: women are sensitive to the design and context of the experiment in ways that men are not. In addition, we go further providing a well-grounded account on the importance of the context for female decision-making.

Strategic risk and response time across games

Experimental data for two types of bargaining games are used to study the role of strategic risk in the decision making process that takes place when subjects play a game only once. The bargaining games are the ultimatum game (UG) and the yes-or-no game (YNG). Strategic risk in a game stems from the effect on one player’s payoff of the behavior of other players. In the UG this risk is high, while it is nearly absent in the YNG. In studying the decision making process of subjects we use the time elapsed before a choice is made (response time) as a proxy for amount of thought or introspection. We find that response times are on average larger in the UG than in the YNG, indicating a positive correlation between strategic risk and introspection. In both games the behavior of subjects with large response times is more dispersed than that of subjects with small response times. In the UG larger response time is associated with less generous and thus riskier behavior, while it is associated with more generous behavior in the YNG.

The tie that divides: Cross-national evidence of the primacy of partyism

Using evidence from Great Britain, the United States, Belgium and Spain, it is demonstrated in this article that in integrated and divided nations alike, citizens are more strongly attached to political parties than to the social groups that the parties represent. In all four nations, partisans discriminate against their opponents to a degree that exceeds discrimination against members of religious, linguistic, ethnic or regional out-groups. This pattern holds even when social cleavages are intense and the basis for prolonged political conflict. Partisan animus is conditioned by ideological proximity; partisans are more distrusting of parties furthest from them in the ideological space. The effects of partisanship on trust are eroded when partisan and social ties collide. In closing, the article considers the reasons that give rise to the strength of ‘partyism’ in modern democracies.

The Emergence of Norms from Conflicts over Just Distributions

Why is it that well-intentioned actions can create persistent conflicts? While norms are widely regarded as a source for cooperation, this article proposes a novel theory in which the emergence of norms can be understood as a bargaining process in which normative conflicts explain the finally emerging norm. The theory is tested with a dynamical experiment on conflicts over the consideration of equality, effort or efficiency for the distribution of joint earnings. Normative conflict is measured by the number of rejected offers in a recursive bargaining game. The emerging normative system is analyzed by feedback cycles between micro- and macro-level. It is demonstrated that more normative cues cause more normative conflict. Further, under the structural conditions of either simple or complex situations, the convergence towards a simple and widely shared norm is likely. In contrast, in moderately complex situations, convergence is unlikely and several equally reasonable norms co-exist. The findings are discussed with respect to the integration of sociological conflict theory with the bargaining concept in economic theory.

Two notions of conventions: an experimental analysis

This paper aims at analyzing the interaction between both economic and sociological notions of convention. To this end, it starts by distinguishing conceptually between specific convention, i.e. an arbitrary but stable social regularity, and general convention, i.e. a principle of action prescribing how to behave in a certain class of situations. A game theoretical framework to represent the interrelation between both concepts is then introduced. Finally, this relation is studied experimentally. The main results of the experiment are: (1) general conventions have to be commonly known and adopted among subjects in order to work as guides to coordinate on specific conventions; (2) once subjects follow a general convention they are highly consistent with it in a repeated environment; (3) efficiency concerns are focal in the class of games studied in this paper.

The Unintended Consequences of Political Mobilization on Trust

Conflicting theories and mixed empirical results exist on the relationship between ethnic diversity and trust. This article argues that these mixed empirical results might be driven by contextual conditions. We conjecture that political competition could strengthen ethnic saliency and, in turn, salient ethnic identities can activate or intensify in-group trust and depress trust in members of other ethnic groups. We test this conjecture using the move toward secession in Catalonia, Spain. We conduct trust experiments across ethnic lines in Catalonia before and during the secessionist process. After three years of proindependence mobilization in Catalonia, one of the ethnic groups, Spanish speakers living in Catalonia, has indeed increased its in-group trust. This result is robust after a set of individual-level variables are controlled for, but no equivalent result is found in a comparable region, the Basque Country.