ECONOMIE COMPORTEMENTALE

Co auteur : Anthony Chung (ESCE)

Abstract : L’industrie textile est l’une des industries les plus polluantes au monde, et est responsable de 20 % de la pollution d’eau potable, 10 % des émissions de gaz à effet de serre et à l’origine d’une quantité importante de déchets. Cependant, le rapport de Forbes de 2019 révèle que, même si 52 % des consommateurs souhaitent que l'industrie de la mode adopte des pratiques plus durables, seuls 29 % seraient prêts à payer plus cher (un surprix responsable) pour des versions des mêmes articles fabriquées de manière plus durable. Bien que des recherches aient étudié les facteurs influençant l’intention de payer un surprix pour des produits alimentaires (Anselmsson, Johansson et Persson, 2007 ; Loureiro, McCluskey et Mittelhammer, 2002 ; Steenkamp, Van Heerde et Geyskens, 2010) ou dans le secteur des services hôteliers (González-Rodríguez, Díaz-Fernández et Font, 2020), aucun article ne traite de l’intention de payer un surprix dans le secteur du textile. A l’ère où les grandes enseignes de fast fashion explosent encore telles que Shein (croissance de 100 % entre 2021 et 2022) de par leurs prix très faibles, il s’avère crucial d’étudier les facteurs qui encouragent les consommateurs à payer un surprix pour un produit textile plus écologique. Nous proposons dans ce papier d’étudier plus particulièrement (1) dans quelle mesure un affichage environnemental, traduit par un Eco-score, influence l’intention de payer un surprix ; et (2) quel(s) niveau(x) de score d’affichage (éco-score A à E) entraîne(nt) une plus grande intention de payer un surprix comparativement à l’absence d’affichage. L’objectif de cet article est de prouver empiriquement que la généralisation d’un affichage environnemental pour les vêtements favorise l’intention de payer un surprix. Pour répondre à cette question, nous mobilisons la littérature sur la théorie du signal (e.g. Boulding et Kirmani, 1993 ; Nabec et al., 2022) et la Value Belief Norm (VBN) (e.g. Bertrandias, Cazes-Valette et Gurviez, 2021). Une collecte de données quantitatives sous la forme d’une expérimentation met au jour les rôles médiateurs de la culpabilité, la perception de l’image verte et les pratiques environnementales de l’entreprise sur la relation entre l’affichage environnemental et l’intention de payer un surprix.

Co-écrit avec Brian Rogers.
Abstract: The assumption of rationality and higher-order reasoning about rationality underpins many models of strategic behavior. We investigate the degree to which this assumption holds in a simple incomplete information game and how that depends on the particular informational environment of the game. The project aims to provide a simple framework for identifying higher-order rationality in incomplete information games and test the implications of different types of information structures on the players’ displayed orders of rationality. We have run a lab experiment and collected data from 115 participants across three treatments, holding the basic game fixed and varying the information structure, where information structures across treatments are ranked in terms of contingent thinking difficulty. We are able to obtain within-subject comparisons of the degree to which more difficult information structures impact the levels of rationality of players.

Co-auteurs: Greg Kubitz et Alice Soldà.

Résumé : This paper investigates whether individuals use information complexity as an excuse to remain ignorant so as to behave more selfishly. We study this question in a context where individuals face a trade-off between their monetary payoff and their pro-environmental preferences. We propose that individuals use information complexity as an excuse to make self-serving mistakes, which allow them to behave more selfishly without compromising their pro-environmental image. To test this idea, we conducted an online experiment in which we varied (i) the complexity of the information regarding the environmental impact of a donation and (ii) whether there is a trade-off between participants' selfish motives and pro-environmental preferences. In line with our hypothesis, we found that participants make more mistakes when information is complex, but even more so when there is a trade-off between their monetary payoff and their pro-environmental preferences. Our findings suggest that pro-environmental individuals do 'play dumb' when doing so gives them an excuse to behave more selfishly without compromising their image

Co-auteures : Magali Dumontet, Johanna Etner, Meglena Jeleva

Abstract : In the term life insurance market, individuals pay a premium covering their death. Insurers secure a certain amount of money that will be paid to beneficiary(ies) in case of death of the policyholder. One contract can differ from another in many ways: the level of private information asked to applicants, the presence of riders in the contract or how the claim is paid. Understanding how individuals' demand is influenced by those possibilities is not straightforward. This research question is approached through a Discrete Choice Experiment on a sample representative of the French population. This method permits to estimate individuals’ behavioral characteristics that influence (1) the term life insurance purchasing decision and (2) Willingness to Pay for each feature of the term life insurance contract. The study is valuable for insurers who want to gain insights into consumers' life insurance purchase behavior, especially for professionals who are involved in product development and marketing.

Co-auteurs: Pietro Biroli, Marina Della Giusta

Abstract: Bias, both conscious and unconscious, perpetuates inequalities within educational settings, impacting teachers and students alike and it is important therefore to establish the extent to which teachers can recognise it so they can activate mitigation. We develop an image-based bias recognition test (IBRT) in which we ask teachers to rate the presence of stereotypes in 20 randomly selected images from a pool of 100 drawn from educational catalogues used in textbooks and systematically relate their ratings and comments to established measures of both implicit bias, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and explicit bias as declared in and self-reported social values from the European Social Survey (ESS).

Co écrit avec Noémi Berlin et Tarek Jaber Lopez
Abstract: In a lab-in-the-field experiment, we investigate the influence of social norms on parents’ beliefs regarding the nutritional quality of food items and their subsequent food choices. We use a 3x2 between-subject experimental design, where we vary two factors: 1-the information provided (control vs. descriptive norm vs. an opinion) and 2-the recipient of the food decisions made by parents (for their own child vs. for another random child). A total of 300 parents report their beliefs about the nutritional score of food items twice and create two sets of food baskets: in a first stage, they respond without any specific information, whereas in a second stage they receive specific information depending on the treatment to which they are assigned. Using difference-in-difference estimation, we find that only the descriptive norm significantly reduces parents' overestimation rate of items' nutritional quality. "Opinion" significantly improves the nutritional quality of both, the parent's and child’s baskets. In contrast, the descriptive social norm only significantly improves the nutritional quality of parent’s food baskets.

Co écrit avec Fabrice Le Lec et Rémi Suchon

Abstract: We explore how individuals apply self-protection strategies to both themselves and charitable organizations, focusing on their willingness to pay to reduce the probability of the worst outcome by 10 percentage points across five different probability levels: 0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 0.8, and 1.0. This research, building on Le Lec et al.'s working paper and utilizing Exley's 2016 method, involves four experimental scenarios. Two of these scenarios measure the personal cost individuals are willing to incur to decrease these probabilities by 10 points, either for themselves or for a charity. The other two scenarios investigate the costs individuals are willing to impose on a charity to reduce these probabilities by 10 points, affecting either the charity itself or the individuals. Our very preliminary findings reveal a tendency for individuals to assign higher costs to charities, regardless of whether the risk reduction benefits themselves or the charity. Additionally, we observe a significant impact of the initial probability of experiencing the worst outcome on the willingness to pay, suggesting that the probability weighting function plays a crucial role. However, this propensity to pay or to impose costs appears to be only marginally influenced by the experimental conditions.

Authors : Gashaw T. Abate(IFPRI) , Tanguy Bernard (BSE , Université de Bordeaux) , Joshua Deutschmann (Development Innovation Lab, University of Chicago) , Fatou Fall (LEDa-DIAL, Université Paris-Dauphine-PSL)
Abstract : Why would farmers invest in technologies that protect the health of their consumers if there are no market rewards associated with food safety? We work with a sample of small-scale groundnut farmers in Senegal, where aflatoxin contamination is a major health concern. We rely on a lab-in-the-field experiment where we elicit their willingness to pay (WTP) for aflatoxins detection in groundnut powder dedicated to their own consumption, donation to local children, or sales at a premium. We find lower WTP for donation, albeit limited to farmers with less than medial reported level of altruism. In turn, a randomly allocated information treatment on the health consequences of aflatoxins increases overall WTP for donated groundnuts and eliminates the effect of altruism.

co-écrit avec Brice Corgnet and Camille Cornand

Résumé: 

Since Barro (2006), the macro-finance literature has shown that accounting for rare macroeconomic disasters helps explain various long-lasting empirical puzzles in financial asset markets through the critical role of disaster risk perceptions. However, individual macroeconomic disaster risk perceptions and their consequences for financial investment have never been directly measured at the microeconomic level.

To fill this gap and investigate whether communication on macroeconomic disaster risk can affect individual perceptions and financial investment decisions, we ran an online experiment on 345 French finance and macroeconomics professionals. We randomly assigned participants to three distinct informational treatments about the past frequency of macroeconomic disasters in a given historical sample (low-precision treatment, high-precision treatment, and salient treatment). We asked participants to estimate this frequency prior and posterior to the treatment and to allocate a sum of money between a risk-free asset and a risky asset whose returns depend on the possibility of a macroeconomic disaster.

We find that, on average, participants significantly overestimate the past frequency of macroeconomic disasters before information provision. At the intensive margin, participants decrease their frequency estimate and uncertainty and increase investment in the risky asset following the treatments. At the extensive margin, the high-precision treatment increases the probability of updating the prior relative to the two other treatments. We also investigate the role of individual variables such as gender, financial literacy score, confidence in prior estimate, and sector of activity.

Abstract: We investigate individuals’ food choices at the restaurant with information about the environmental impact of the meals. We ask whether information about CO2 emissions of the main meal on a restaurant menu alters the choice of guests between beef and sea trout under high or low social influence of other guests around the table. We followed a 2 x 2 design differentiated by the information given or not and the high or low social influence. For guests with the information, they could read on the menu that consuming beef participates more to climate change than consuming sea trout; guests without information had only the meals presented on the menu. For guests with the high social influence, they were allowed to discuss before making their choice of the main meal whereas for guests with the low social influence, they had to choose their main meal without communication with other people around the table. We also asked guests to reply to a short questionnaire about their meal preferences and their expectations regarding other guests’ food choice of the main meal, i.e. the social norm. Experiments were run at the Living lab of the Institut Paul Bocuse in Lyon, France, between April and June 2022. In total, 486 guests participated. The results show that the guests’ normative beliefs about the choice of fish as being socially acceptable increase when they receive the information about CO2 emissions which in turn significantly affects the choice of fish. The fish is slightly more chosen when the guests receive the environmental information and are allowed to discuss before ordering, but this effect is not significant. 

Abstract: I analyze Dutch panel data that contains rich information on voting, political opinions, and personality traits. I show that “adversarial” economic preferences – competitiveness and negative reciprocity – but also “prosocial” preferences including trust and altruism are strong predictors of political preferences, with predictive power similar to household income. Past studies have shown that standard personality traits are reliably linked to political preferences. I replicate these associations and show that competitiveness and social preferences predict voting independently from – and often with larger effect sizes than – these other traits. The complex Dutch party landscape allows me to go further than a simple left-right comparison to show that associations between individual traits and political preferences are non-linear along the left-right spectrum. Competitiveness predicts voting for center-right, economically liberal parties whereas social preferences are stronger predictors for voting for the populist far right. Put differently, competitiveness predicts voting for parties that are economically conservative whereas negative reciprocity and low pro-sociality predict voting for parties that are socially conservative.

Co-écrit avec Laurent Denant-Boèmont

Abstract:
We investigate how ego depletion might impact cooperation levels for individuals. To this end, we propose a theoretical model in which an individual contributes to a public good in a VCM (Voluntary Contribution Mechanism) game after having been exposed to ego depletion. This model first aims at specifying the main parameters of the depletion function at the individual level and, second, to provide a theoretical relationship between individual characteristics of the depletion function and the contribution level. We use this model to build an economic experiment where participants enter a VCM game after having been exposed to ego depletion. Our experimental treatments vary in the degree of ego depletion to isolate the effect of this latter on contribution. First experimental results highlights the impact of self control in the level of contribution in a one-shot public good game. In particular, we observe a strong and negative relationship between ego-depletion and the level of cooperation while the initial level of willpower fails to explain the level of contribution.

Abstract:
The study of gender differences in competitiveness has been a widely explored topic in experimental economics, with a focus on its contribution to the gender wage gap. Recent research in psychology has employed virtual reality (VR) to manipulate individuals' embodiment in bodies with different characteristics, including gender. This has been shown to alter the perception of the self, with participants who underwent a 'gender swap' via VR identifying more with the opposite gender and exhibiting self-attribution of traits stereotypically associated with that gender, such as competitiveness. To test whether these self-reported results on attitudes extend to behavior, I examine the impact of such a virtual “gender swap” on selection into competitive environments in the lab. Although the VR intervention impacted several secondary outcomes, including overconfidence, it did not have a significant effect on the gender gap in tournament selection. The results have implications for the study of embodiment interventions and gender differences in competition.

Coécrit avec Mathieu Lambotte, Anna Risch et Sandrine Mathy (GAEL)

Résumé : We investigate the role of peer effects in the workplace on individual choices of active transportation mode. We collect original data through an online survey on networks and sustainable behaviors among 334 individuals working in ten laboratories of the University of Grenoble Alps in February 2020. We apply linear and non-linear models of peer effects on active modal choice, untangling the role of conformism and strategic complementarity in social influence. We show that given our data, a linear local-average specification is the preferred empirical model of peer effects and we estimate strong and significant endogenous peer effects.

Résumé : We experimentally study how individuals read strategically-transmitted information when they have preferences over what they will learn. Subjects play disclosure games in which Receivers should interpret messages skeptically. We vary whether the state that Senders communicate about is ego-relevant or neutral for Receivers, and whether skeptical beliefs are aligned or not with what Receivers prefer believing. Compared to neutral settings, skepticism is significantly lower when it is self-threatening, and not enhanced when it is self-serving. These results shed light on a new channel that individuals can use to protect their beliefs in communication situation: they exercise skepticism in a motivated way, that is, in a way that depends on the desirability of the conclusions that skeptical inferences lead to.

Co-auteurs : Vincent Lenglin (Anthropo-Lab, Université Catholique de Lille), Joel Santos (IESEG, EDHEC)

Co auteurs : Loukas Balafoutas et Brit Grosskopf (University of Exeter, United Kingdom)