Mitchell Hoffman

DOES HIGHER INCOME MAKE YOU MORE ALTRUISTIC? EVIDENCE FROM THE HOLOCAUST

This paper considers the decision of Gentiles whether to rescue Jews during the Holocaust, a situation of altruistic behavior under life-or-death stakes. I examine the role to which economic factors may have influenced the decision to be a rescuer. Using cross-country data and detailed individual-level data on rescuers and nonrescuers, I find that richer countries had many more rescuers than poorer ones, and within countries, richer people were more likely to be rescuers than poorer people. The individual-level effect of income on being a rescuer remains significant after controlling for ease-of-rescue variables, such as the number of rooms in ones home, suggesting that the correlation of income and rescue is not solely driven by richer people having more resources for rescue. Given that richer people might be thought to have more to lose by rescuing, the evidence is consistent with the view that altruism increases with income.

How is Information Valued? Evidence from Framed Field Experiments

Do people buy the right amount of information? In a novel field experiment, businesspeople experts provided guesses about the price and quality of actual websites. Compensation was provided for correct results (high or low). Before answers were revealed, subjects could pay to get a noisy signal. I find that the relationship between subjects’ accuracy and their demand for information is much flatter than would be optimal. Subjects underpay for information when signals are valuable and overpay when signals are less valuable. I also find that subjects exhibit significant overconfidence. However, even when the value of information is adjusted to account for subjects’ overconfidence or subjects’ tendency to sometimes misuse information, subjects underpay when signals are valuable and overpay when signals are less valuable.

Who's Naughty? Who's Nice? Experiments on Whether Pro-Social Workers are Selected Out of Cutthroat Business Environments

Levitt and List (2007) hypothesize that pro-social individuals will be selected out of cutthroat industries. To study this, we measure the pro-social preferences of individuals in two such industries, domain trading and online adult entertainment (pornography). Contrary to the selection hypothesis, we find that these individuals exhibit a high degree of pro-sociality. They exhibit more altruism, trust, trustworthiness, and honesty than the typical student subject. They also respond differently to shame-based incentives. We offer a theory of reverse selection that can rationalize these findings.

People Management Skills, Employee Attrition, and Manager Rewards: An Empirical Analysis

How much do a manager’s interpersonal skills with subordinates, which we call people management skills, affect employee outcomes? Are managers rewarded for having such skills? Using personnel data from a large, high-tech firm, we show that survey-measured people management skills have a strong negative relation to employee turnover. A causal interpretation is reinforced by research designs exploiting new workers joining the firm and manager moves. However, people management skills do not consistently improve most observed non-attrition outcomes. Better people managers themselves receive higher subjective performance ratings, higher promotion rates, and larger salary increases.

Social Networks and Voting

This paper uses a randomized experiment to study whether social networks affect vote choice. In a fiercely contested presidential election in Peru with ten candidates, only 35% of subjects were aware how their friends intended to vote. We compare people who were randomly informed how one of their friends intended to vote to people who were randomly informed how an un-named stranger intended to vote. We find no evidence that informing people how their friends intended to vote affects their vote choice.