College of Agriculture & Natural Resources
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Item Social Preferences Among Clinicians in Tanzania: Evidence from the Lab and the Field(2011) Brock, J. Michelle; Leonard, Kenneth L.; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Health worker effort can have a dramatic influence on patient outcomes. This is especially true in developing countries, where poor overall quality of healthcare systems is the norm. There is evidence, however, that despite low levels of education and experience, clinicians in Tanzania underperform relative to their ability (Leonard and Masatu, 2005). Understanding clinicians' intrinsic motivations may help us identify nonmonetary incentives for improving quality of care. To this end, this dissertation considers how risk, pride and social information impact altruism among Tanzanian clinicians. In Chapter 4, we study how risky environments impact social preferences. With experimental evidence from games with risky outcomes, we establish that social preferences of players who give in standard dictator games are best described by consideration of equating ex ante chances to win rather than of ex post payoffs. The more money decision-makers transfer in the dictator game, the more likely they are to equalize payoff chances under risk. Risk to the recipient does, however, generally decrease the transferred amount. Also, while some people behave generously regardless of the attributes of others, pride and knowledge about the recipient characteristics may also motivate altruistic behavior. In Chapter 5, we explore the role of social information and pride in determining pro-social behavior among clinicians in Tanzania. We find that making someone feel proud increases the number of "fair" allocations (50/50 giving) and that those who do not respond to decreased partner anonymity are less responsive to induced pride. Chapter 6 combines laboratory data on social preferences and field data on clinicians' workplace effort. This study is unique in that we observe the same subjects from the laboratory in a field setting, where pro-social behavior has large welfare impacts. We use modified dictator games to define subjects as fair types, social information responsive types and pride responsive types and test how those characteristics are correlated with effort in the workplace. We find that clinicians responsive to both pride and social information provide higher than average effort in the workplace. These results are suggestive of Ellingsen and Johannesson's (2008) theory of social preferences wherein social identity and esteem interact to motivate altruism.Item Essays in Behavioral and Experimental Economics(2006-05-18) Alevy, Jonathan Eliot; Chambers, Robert G.; List, John A .; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Behavioral economics aims to provide more realistic psychological foundations for economic models. Experimental methods can contribute to this effort by providing the ability to identify causal processes and motivations that can be confounded in field settings. The essays in this dissertation examine three critical issues in behavioral economics using lab and field experiments. The first two essays examine two core elements of economic rationality; expected utility theory and Bayesian updating. The essays consider, respectively, ambiguity, and information cascades, in environments in which limitations of the theories can be studied. The third essay examines a contracting game in which other-regarding preferences are explicitly considered. Decision making under ambiguity has been of interest to economists since the 1920's (Knight (1921), Keynes (1921)). It has received renewed attention due to the work of Ellsberg (1961). In the first essay I examine the stability of ambiguity attitudes using a within subject design across individual choice and market environments. The evidence favors stability, with attitudes elicited from individuals strongly correlated with trading decisions in asset markets. The comparative ignorance hypothesis of Fox and Tversky (1995) developed for individual choice is also supported in the market setting shedding light on the causes of ambiguity aversion. Previous empirical studies of information cascades have used either naturally occurring data or laboratory experiments. In the second essay attractive elements of each line of research are combined by observing market professionals from the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) in a controlled environment. Analysis of over 1500 decisions suggests that CBOT professionals behave differently than a student control group. Professionals are better able to discern the quality of public signals and their decisions are not affected by the domain of earnings. These results have important implications for market efficiency. The contracting game studies both one and two principal settings. With one principal, behavior is consistent with a reputational model in which principals are successful in structuring contracts to insure against defections by agents imitating inequity-averse behavior. The complexity of the two principal setting creates more difficulties, but there is evidence that reciprocity between principals partially mitigates the adverse payoff consequences.