Presentations - PhD EM - 29th cycle

Doctoral programme in Economics and Management

Thursday, 5 November - 2 pm - Laboratory 4, School of Social Sciences

Presenters

• Chiara D'Arcangelo: Be nice, but not always: reputation and information in trust games

Abstract

In principal-agent models, the theory of incentives predicts that an agent will exert high effort only when incentivized. Nonetheless, experimental studies on repeated games show that cooperative behavior may emerge in situations where no incentive is present, and one of the explanations is that individuals can be motivated by future gains they may obtain from building a positive reputation. Theoretical models have been developed where individuals know, directly or indirectly, the opponent's past behavior, and, in those cases, cooperation is usually enhanced when more information is made available. Usually, but not always: in the first part of this study, we describe an equilibrium of the repeated trust game with indefinite ending where strategies prescribe a mixture of cooperation and defection. We characterize the equilibrium strategies both in the case of two long-lived players, and in the case of a long-lived player interacting with several short run players. The second part tests this unexpected result with a laboratory experiment:in an indefinitely repeated trust game, subjects indeed tend to mix more when frequencies on the opponent's past behavior are available, being able sometimes to have an higher payoffs than those using a fully cooperative strategy. Understanding cooperative behavior is fundamental for designing contracts that are able to align different interests of several parties, and the present paper shows that giving information on past behavior is not enough to obtain full cooperation.

• Kaku Attah Damoah: Reconsidering Heterogeneity and Efficiency in African Manufacturing: Evidence from Ghana

Abstract

Conventional models used to measure efficiency levels provide no mechanism to disentangle firm-specific unobserved heterogeneity from inefficiency, treating the two as a single component. Efficiency measures obtained under such approach can potentially lead to misleading results in economic applications. This paper reconsider efficiency estimates and its implications by using two conventional models and third one that account for unobserved heterogeneity on African manufacturing firms. Predicted firm-level eefficiencies obtained from the three models are then applied to export participation.
Provisional results show that once firm-specific unobserved are separated from efficiency, export participation of African manufacturing firms is not explained by productive efficiency.
Keywords: African manufacturing, Efficiency, Heterogeneity, Pairwise differencing
JEL Classification: O14, D24, C23

• Kerry E. Hellmuth: HealthyMe: Experimentation in Behavioral Economics to Encourage Walking and Cycling as modes of transportation

Abstract

TBA