Winter term 2018/19

Das Öffentliche Recht und die Kunst der Prognose

  • Date: Mar 25, 2019
  • Time: 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Michael Goldhammer
  • University of Bayreuth
  • Location: MPI

Determinants of fair behavior. An evolutionary perspective and some experimental evidence from Guinea

  • Date: Mar 11, 2019
  • Time: 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Roger Berger
  • University of Leipzig
  • Location: MPI

Substituting Invalid Contract Terms: Theory and Empirics (with Ori Katz)

  • Date: Feb 25, 2019
  • Time: 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Eyal Zamir
  • Center for Empirical Studies of Decision Making and the Law, University of Jerusalem
  • Location: MPI

The Value of an Attorney: Evidence from Changes to the Collateral Source Rule

  • Date: Feb 18, 2019
  • Time: 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Eric Helland
  • Claremont McKenna College
  • Location: MPI

Power, Knowledge and Justice: Experiments on Distributive Decisions in Networks

  • Date: Feb 11, 2019
  • Time: 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Bernhard Kittel
  • University of Kiel
  • Location: MPI

Delegation and team selection

  • Date: Feb 4, 2019
  • Time: 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: John Hamman
  • Florida State University
  • Location: MPI

Prosociality: Hard to build but easy to destroy (with Michela Tincani)

  • Date: Jan 30, 2019
  • Time: 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Fabian Kosse
  • LMU Munich & briq
  • Location: MPI

Determinants and malleability of truth-telling preferences

  • Date: Jan 23, 2019
  • Time: 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Johannes Abeler
  • University of Oxford
  • Location: MPI

Guilty Minds and Biased Minds

  • Date: Jan 21, 2019
  • Time: 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Markus Kneer
  • University of Zurich (UZH)
  • Location: MPI

Exploiting Uncertainty about the Number of Competitors in Procurement Auctions

  • Date: Jan 16, 2019
  • Time: 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Achim Wambach
  • ZEW
  • Location: MPI

Aspirational Goals, Overpromising, and Negative Spillovers (with A. Leibovitch and M. Versteeg)

Who should benefit from affirmative action? Ability, effort and discrimination as justifications for quota rules

  • Date: Dec 12, 2018
  • Time: 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch
  • Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE)
  • Location: MPI

Civic Honesty Around the Globe

  • Date: Dec 12, 2018
  • Time: 10:00 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Michel Maréchal
  • University of Zurich
  • Location: MPI

CREED Workshop

  • Date: Nov 28, 2018
  • Location: MPI

Methods of complexity reduction and their effects in social, economic, and computational environments

  • Date: Nov 26, 2018
  • Time: 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Jürgen Jost
  • Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig
  • Location: MPI

Dispelling misconceived beliefs: the case of rent control

  • Date: Nov 21, 2018
  • Time: 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Jordi Brandts
  • Barcelona Graduate School of Economics
  • Location: MPI

Advancing Evolutionary and Cultural Perspectives on Interdependence and Cooperation

  • Date: Nov 19, 2018
  • Time: 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Daniel Balliet
  • University of Amsterdam
  • Location: MPI

Poverty negates the impact of social norms on cheating (co-authored with Suparee Boonmanunt and Stephan Meier)

  • Date: Nov 14, 2018
  • Time: 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Agne Kajackaite
  • WZB Berlin Social Science Center
  • Location: MPI

How institutions shape culture: evidence from a large-scale land tenure reform implemented as randomized control-trial

  • Date: Nov 5, 2018
  • Time: 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Marco Fabri
  • University of Amsterdam
  • Location: MPI

Parochial Altruism: Measurement Issues

  • Date: Oct 24, 2018
  • Time: 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Robert Böhm
  • RWTH Aachen University
  • Location: MPI

Ethical free-riding: When honest people find dishonest partners

  • Date: Oct 22, 2018
  • Time: 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Shaul Shalvi
  • University of Amsterdam
  • Location: MPI
Corruption is often the product of coordinated rule-violations. We investigate how such corrupt collaboration emerges and spreads when people can choose their partners (vs. not). Participants were assigned a partner and could increase their payoff by coordinated lying. After several interactions, they were either free to choose whether to stay or switch partners, or forced to stay with (or switch) their partner. Results reveal both dishonest and honest people exploit the freedom to choose a partner. Dishonest people seek and find a partner that will also lie—a “partner in crime.” Honest people, by contrast, engage in ethical free-riding: they refrain from lying but also from leaving dishonest partners, taking advantage of their partners’ lies. We conclude that to curb collaborative corruption, relying on people’s honesty is insufficient. Encouraging honest individuals not to engage in ethical free-riding is essential. [more]

The Rule of Law and Voluntary Cooperation: Experimental Evidence from 43 Societies

tba
  • Date: Oct 17, 2018
  • Time: 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Simon Gächter
  • School of Economics, University of Nottingham
  • Location: MPI

Safe Spaces for Women: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Sierra Leone During the Ebola Epidemic

  • Date: Oct 10, 2018
  • Time: 04:15 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Imran Rasul
  • University College London
  • Location: MPI
The condition of women in developing countries is characterized by low economic empowerment and limited agency over their body. This paper evaluates a policy intervention aimed at relaxing these constraints for adolescent girls in Sierra Leone, a setting in which women experience high levels of sexual violence and face numerous other economic disadvantages. The intervention provides young women with a safe space (a club) where they can find support, access vocational training and information on reproductive health. Unexpectedly, the post-baseline period coincided with the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the most severe ever recorded. Compounding the epidemic's health costs, the closure of all schools and mobility restrictions resulted in acute disruptions to socioeconomic life. Our analysis leverages the cross-village variation in severity of village-level disruptions and random assignment of villages to the intervention to document the impact of the Ebola outbreak on 4700 women tracked in 200 villages, and the ameliorating role played by the intervention. In control villages, over the crisis, women spend significantly more time with men, out-of-wedlock pregnancy rates rise, and those exposed to severe Ebola-related disruption have a 16pp drop in school enrolment post-crisis. These adverse effects are significantly reversed in treated villages. The intervention thus fosters a range of basic skills, as well as entrepreneurial skills and health knowledge gained from intervention clubs. The results show how policy interventions can be effective even in times of aggregate shocks, and highlights the lack of safe spaces in low-empowerment contexts such as Sierra Leone, is a key channel through which an aggregate crisis damages the economic lives of young women. [more]

What Do Employee Referral Programs Do?

What Do Employee Referral Programs Do?
  • Date: Sep 27, 2018
  • Time: 11:00 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Matthias Heinz
  • University of Cologne
  • Location: MPI
In an RCT covering all grocery store jobs at a European grocery chain, 238 stores were randomized to give information to employees or pay them different bonuses for making referrals. Larger bonuses increase referrals and decrease referral quality, though the increase in referrals is fairly modest. Still, the employee referral programs (ERPs) are highly profitable. This reflects in part that referred workers are substantially more likely to stay than non-referrals, but primarily that non-referrals have higher retention in stores treated with ERPs relative to control stores. The firm rolled out an ERP across the entire firm and increased bonuses. In the post-RCT rollout, referral rates remain low for grocery jobs, but are high for non-grocery jobs, which are perceived as much more attractive. Our results (1) are consistent with a model where referrals are driven by both monetary incentives and altruism toward friends and (2) show that ERPs can have substantial benefits beyond the people who are referred. [more]
Go to Editor View