Discussion Paper No. 310
January 14, 2022
Experimenting with Purchase History Based Price Discrimination: a Comment
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Brokesova, Deck and Peliova [Int. J. Ind. Organ. 37 (2014) 229-237] have shown that comparative static results from two-period behavior-based pricing models hold in laboratory experiments, but they observed significant differences from point predictions. We report findings in conformity with these point predictions throughout a uniform pricing benchmark, a replication of Brokesova, Deck and Peliova’s behavior-based pricing treatment and a follow-up experiment. Reference dependence seems to shift participants’ second-period pricing behavior upwards. A post hoc analysis shows that considering myopic consumers instead of strategic consumers explains a downward shift of first-period prices and rationalizes the findings of Brokesova, Deck and Peliova. Volatile price levels affect price-based welfare measures such as sellers’ profits and customers’ total costs. We show that transport costs serve as a robust welfare measure, alleviating the impact of distorted prices. These findings are relevant for the design of experiments and when assessing the efficiency of experimental markets.
Keywords:
behavior-based price discrimination; pricing experiment;
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Discussion Paper No. 300
November 16, 2021
Face Mask Use and Physical Distancing Before and After Mandatory Masking: No Evidence on Risk Compensation in Public Waiting Lines
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During the COVID-19 pandemic, the introduction of mandatory face mask usage triggered a heated debate. A major point of controversy is whether community use of masks creates a false sense of security that would diminish physical distancing, counteracting any potential direct benefit from masking. We conducted a randomized field experiment in Berlin, Germany, to investigate how masks affect distancing and whether the mask effect interacts with the introduction of an indoor mask mandate. Joining waiting lines in front of stores, we measured distances kept from the experimenter in two treatment conditions – the experimenter wore a mask in one and no face covering in the other – in two time spans – before and after mask use becoming mandatory in stores. We find no evidence that mandatory masking has a negative effect on distance kept toward a masked person. To the contrary, masks significantly increase distancing and the effect does not differ between the two periods. However, we show that after the mandate distances are shorter in locations where more non-essential stores, which were closed before the mandate, had reopened. We argue that the relaxations in general restrictions that coincided with the mask mandate led individuals to reduce other precautions, like keeping a safe distance.
Keywords:
COVID-19; face masks; social distancing; risk compensation; field experiment; health policy;
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Discussion Paper No. 289
November 10, 2021
Report-Dependent Utility and Strategy-Proofness
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Despite the truthful dominant strategy, participants in strategy-proof me- chanisms submit manipulated preferences. In our model, participants dislike rejections and enjoy the confirmation from getting what they declared most desirable. Formally, the payo↵ from a match decreases in its position in the submitted ranking such that a strategic trade-o↵ between preference inten- sity and match probability arises. This trade-o↵ can trigger the commonly observed self-selection strategies. We show that misrepresentations can per- sist for arbitrarily small report-dependent components. However, honesty is guaranteed to be optimal if and only if there is no conflict between the quality and feasibility of a match.
Keywords:
market design; matching; school choice; self-regarding preferences; strategy-proof mechanism;
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Discussion Paper No. 279
Teams and Individuals in Standard Auction Formats: Decision and Emotions
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Our study compares individual and team bidding in standard auction formats: first-price, second-price and ascending-price (English) auctions with independent private values. In a laboratory experiment, we find that individuals overbid more than teams in first-price auctions and deviate more from bidding their own value in second-price auctions. However we observe no difference in bidding behavior in English auctions. Based on control variables, we claim that the observed difference can be explained by better reasoning abilities of teams. Emotions play a role in determining bids, but the effect of emotions on bidding does not differ between individuals and teams.
Keywords:
auctions; team decision-making; experiment; overbidding;
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Discussion Paper No. 268
All-Pay Competition with Captive Consumers
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We study a game in which two firms compete in quality to serve a market consisting of consumers with different initial consideration sets. If both firms invest below a certain threshold, they only compete for those consumers already aware of their existence. Above this threshold, a firm is visible to all and the highest investment attracts all consumers. On the one hand, the existence of initially captive consumers introduces an anti-competitive element: holding fixed the behavior of its rival, a firm with a larger captive segment enjoys a higher payoff from not investing at all. On the other hand, the fact that a firm’s initially captive consumers can still be attracted by very high quality introduces a pro-competitive element: a high investment becomes more profitable for the underdog when the captive segment of the dominant firm increases. The share of initially captive consumers therefore has a non-monotonic effect on the investment levels of both firms and on consumer surplus. We relate our findings to competition cases in digital markets.
Keywords:
consideration set; regulation; all-pay auction; endogenous prize; digital markets;
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Discussion Paper No. 243
November 9, 2021
Covid-19 Crisis Fuels Hostility against Foreigners
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Intergroup conflicts represent one of the most pressing problems facing human society. Sudden spikes in aggressive behavior, including pogroms, often take place during periods of economic hardship or health pandemics, but little is known about the underlying mechanism behind such change in behavior. Many scholars attribute it to scapegoating, a psychological need to redirect anger and to blame an out-group for hardship and problems beyond one's own control. However, causal evidence of whether hardship triggers out-group hostility has been lacking. Here we test this idea in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, focusing on the common concern that it may foster nationalistic sentiments and racism. Using a controlled money-burning task, we elicited hostile behavior among a nationally representative sample (n = 2,186) in a Central European country, at a time when the entire population was under lockdown and border closure. We find that exogenously elevating salience of thoughts related to Covid-19 pandemic magnifies hostility and discrimination against foreigners, especially from Asia. This behavioral response is large in magnitude and holds across various demographic sub-groups. For policy, the results underscore the importance of not inflaming racist sentiments and suggest that efforts to recover international trade and cooperation will need to address both social and economic damage.
Keywords:
COVID-19 pandemic; scapegoating; hostility; inter-group conflict; discrimination; experiment;
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Discussion Paper No. 233
Cooperation in a Company: A Large-Scale Experiment
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We analyze cooperation within a company setting in order to study the relationship between cooperative attitudes and financial as well as non-financial rewards. In total, 910 employees of a large software company participate in an incentivized online experiment. We observe high levels of cooperation and the typical conditional contribution patterns in a modified public goods game. When linking experiment and company record data, we observe that cooperative attitudes of employees do not pay off in terms of financial rewards within the company. Rather, cooperative employees receive non-financial benefits such as recognition or friendship as the main reward medium. In contrast to most studies in the experimental laboratory, sustained levels of cooperation in our company setting relate to non-financial values of cooperation rather than solely to financial incentives.
Keywords:
cooperation; social dilemma; field experiment; company;
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Discussion Paper No. 228
Behavior-Based Price Discrimination under Endogenous Privacy
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This paper analyzes consumers’ privacy choice concerning their private data and firms’ ensuing pricing strategy. The General Data Protection Regulation passed by the European Union in May 2018 allows consumers to decide whether to reveal private information in the form of cookies to an online seller. By incorporating this endogenous decision into a duopoly model with behavior-based pricing, we find two contrasting equilibria. Under revelation to both firms, consumers disclose their information. Under revelation to only one firm, consumers hide their information. Based on the model, we design a laboratory experiment. We find that there is a large share of consumers who reveal their private data. Particularly, less privacy-concerned subjects and subjects in the setting where only one firm receives information are more likely to reveal information.
Keywords:
behavior-based pricing; privacy; laboratory experiment;
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Discussion Paper No. 211
Are Strategies Anchored?
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Anchoring is one of the most studied and robust behavioral biases, but there is little knowledge about its persistence in strategic settings. This article studies the role of anchoring bias in private-value auctions. We test experimentally two different anchor types. The announcement of a random group identification number but also of an upper bid limit in the first-price sealed-bid auction result in higher bids. We show that such behavior can be explained as a rational response to biased beliefs. In Dutch auctions, the effect of a starting price, is negative. We demonstrate that the long-established ranking that the Dutch auction generates lower revenue than the first-price sealed-bid auction crucially depends on the size of the anchor.
Keywords:
anchoring bias; games; incomplete information; auctions;
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Discussion Paper No. 208
School Choice and Loss Aversion
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Extensive evidence suggests that participants in the direct student-proposing deferred-acceptance mechanism (DSPDA) play dominated strategies. In particular, students with low priority tend to misrepresent their preferences for popular schools. To explain the observed data, we introduce expectationbased loss aversion into a school-choice setting and characterize choiceacclimating personal equilibria in DSPDA. Truthful equilibria can fail to exist, and DSPDA might implement unstable and more ineffi cient allocations in both small and large markets. Speci fically, it discriminates against students who are more loss averse or less overconfident than their peers, and amplifi es already existing (or perceived) discrimination. To level the playing field, we propose serial dictatorship mechanisms as a strategyproof and stable alternative that is robust to these biases.
Keywords:
market design; matching; school choice; reference-dependent preferences; loss aversion; deferred acceptance;
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