Paris School of Economics - École d'Économie de Paris

Paris School of Economics - Ecole d'Economie de Paris
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Seminars

Economics and Psychology

This seminar is dedicated to research in behavioural and experimental economics. It is open to specialists in various fields such as economics, psychology, sociology, philosophy and neurosciences.

The seminar takes place every Friday, from 10 to 11:30 am.

It will be located at the Jourdan campus of the Paris School of Economics in the first semester (November 2009-February 2010) and at the Maison des Sciences Economiques in the second semester (March-June 2010).

The organizers are: Sacha Bourgeois Gironde, Guillaume Hollard, Louis Levy-Garboua, Claudia Senik. If you wish to present a paper or be informed via e-mail, please contact Guillaume Hollard ou Claudia Senik. Last year’s schedule : http://eurequa.univ-paris1.fr/S%E9minaires-GT-Eurequa/ecopsycho/eco-psycho2006.htm

Location of the seminar in the first semester: Paris School of Economics Ecole normale supérieure (ENS), 48 Boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris accès: http://www.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/spip.php?rubrique60&lang=en


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Archives

  • Friday 2 July 2010
    MSE, salle S3 (rez-de-chaussée, nouveau bâtiment) (10h00-11h30)
    Lucas COFFMAN (Harvard Universty) : The Schooling Decision: Family Preferences, Intergenerational Conflict, and Moral Hazard in the Brazilian Favelas
  • Monday 28 June 2010
    MSE, salle S3 (rez-de-chaussée, nouveau bâtiment) (17h00-18h30)
    Nuriele NIEDERLE (Stanford University) : Self-serving beliefs
    SEMINAIRE EXCEPTIONNEL
  • Friday 25 June 2010
    MSE, salle S2 (rez-de-chaussée, nouveau bâtiment) (10h00-11h30)
    Bob WILLIS (University of Michigan) : Stock market crash and expectations of American households
    Co-auteur(s) : Peter Hudomiet & Gabor Kezdi
    CHANGEMENT : La localisation est modifiée.
  • Friday 18 June 2010
    MSE, salle S3 (rez-de-chaussée, nouveau bâtiment) (10h00-11h30)
    Marc FLEURBAEY (CNRS & University Paris-Descartes, Paris) : *
    CHANGEMENT : séance annulée
  • Friday 11 June 2010
    MSE, salle S3 (rez-de-chaussée, nouveau bâtiment) (10h00-11h30)
    Michael MACBRIDE (University of California, Irvine CA) : Conflict, Settlement, and the Shadow of the Future
    Co-auteur(s) : Stergios Skaperdas
    Abstract
    In many instances of potential violent or non-violent conflict, the future strategic positions of adversaries are very di..erent when there is open conflict than when there is settlement. Then, we show that as the future becomes more important, open conflict becomes more likely than settlement. We discuss the applicability of this finding in war, litigation, and other settings, and test it it in a laboratory experiment. We find that subjects are more likely to engage in risky conflict as the future becomes more important.
    JEL Classifications: C72, C91, D01, D74.
    Keywords: conflict, litigation, property rights, folk theorem.
  • Friday 4 June 2010
    MSE, salle S3 (rez-de-chaussée, nouveau bâtiment) (10h00-11h30)
    Nicolas CHRISTAKIS (Harvard University, Boston MA) : *
    LA SEANCE EST ANNULEE
  • Friday 28 May 2010
    MSE, salle S3 (rez-de-chaussée, nouveau bâtiment) (10h00-11h30)
    Luc ARRONDEL (PSE, Paris) & André MASSON (PSE, Paris) : French savers in teh economic crisis (May 2007-June 2009): what has changed?
  • Friday 21 May 2010
    MSE, salle S3 (rez-de-chaussée, nouveau bâtiment) (10h00-11h30)
    workshop experimental economics
    full text [pdf]
  • Friday 14 May 2010
    MSE, salle S3 (rez-de-chaussée, nouveau bâtiment) (10h00-11h30)
    Thomas DOHMEN (Maastricht University, ROA) : The Effect of Cognitive Skills on Unemployment Duration
    Co-auteur(s) : Armin Falk, David Huffman, Simon Jaeger & Uwe Sunde
  • Friday 7 May 2010
    MSE, salle S3 (rez-de-chaussée, nouveau bâtiment) (10h00-11h30)
    Frédéric KOESSLER (PSE, Paris) : Using or Hiding Private Information? An Experimental Study of Zero-Sum Repeated Games with Incomplete Information
  • Friday 16 April 2010
    MSE, salle S3 (rez-de-chaussée, nouveau bâtiment) (10h00-11h30)
    Jeremy CELSE (LAMETA, Université Montpellier) : Will Joe the Plumber Envy Bill Gates
    full text [pdf] full text [pdf]
  • Friday 9 April 2010
    CHANGEMENT : La séance est annulée.
  • Friday 2 April 2010
    MSE, salle S3 (rez-de-chaussée, nouveau bâtiment) (10h00-11h30)
    Timothy CASON (Purdue University, West Lafayette IN) : Learning, Teaching, and Turn Taking in the Repeated Assigment Game
    Co-auteur(s) : Sau-Him Paul Lau & Vai-Lam Mui
  • Friday 26 March 2010
    MSE, salle S3 (rez-de-chaussée, nouveau bâtiment) (10h00-11h30)
    Andrew CAPLIN (New York University, New York) : Dopamine and Reward Prediction Error
  • Friday 19 March 2010
    MSE, salle S3 (rez-de-chaussée, nouveau bâtiment) (10h00-11h30)
    Mathias PESSIGLIONE (MBB, CRICM, INSERM, UPMC, Hopital Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris) : Inscription cérébrale des motivations
  • Friday 12 March 2010
    MSE, salle S3 (rez-de-chaussée, nouveau bâtiment) (10h00-11h30)
    Fabrice ETILE (PSE, Paris) : Happy Houses?
  • Friday 19 February 2010
    Campus Jourdan, bâtiment F, 1er étage, salle de Réunions (10h00-11h30)
    PAS DE SEMINAIRE
  • Friday 12 February 2010
    Campus Jourdan, bâtiment F, 1er étage, salle de Réunions (10h00-11h30)
    Claudia SENIK (PSE, Paris) : You Can’t be Happier than your Wife. Happiness Gaps and Divorce
    Co-auteur(s) : Cahit Guven & Holger Stichnoth
    Abstract
    This paper asks whether the gap in subjective happiness between spouses matters per se, i.e. whether it predicts divorce. We use three panel databases to explore this question. Controlling for the level of life satisfaction of spouses, we find that a higher satisfaction gap, even in the first year of marriage, increases the likelihood of a future separation. We interpret this as the effect of comparisons of well-being between spouses, i.e. aversion to unequal sharing of well-being inside couples. To our knowledge, this effect has never been taken into account by existing economic models of the household. The relation between happiness gaps and divorce may be due to the fact that couples which are unable to transfer utility are more at risk than others. It may also be the case that assortative mating in terms of happiness baseline-level reduces the risk of separation. However, we show that assortative mating is not the end of the story. First, our results hold in fixed-effects estimates that take away the effect of the initial quality of the match between spouses: fixed-effects estimates suggest that a widening of the happiness gap over time raises the risk of separation. Second, we uncover an asymmetry in the effect of happiness gaps: couples are more likely to break-up when the difference in life satisfaction is unfavourable to the wife. The information available in the Australian survey reveals that divorces are indeed predominantly initiated by women, and importantly, by women who are unhappier than their husband. Hence, happiness gaps seem to matter to spouses, not only because they reflect a mismatch in terms of baseline happiness, but because they matter as such.
    Keywords: divorce, happiness, comparisons, panel, households, marriage.
    JEL codes: J12, D13, D63, D64, H31, I31, Z13
  • Friday 5 February 2010
    Campus Jourdan, bâtiment F, 1er étage, salle de Réunions (10h00-11h30)
    Olivier GOSSNER (PSE, Paris) : Performing Best when it Matters Most: Evidence from professional tennis
    Co-auteur(s) : Julio Gonzalez-Diaz & Brian W. Rogers
    Abstract
    sychological skills impact performance. This suggests that when analyzing behavior, in addition to cognitive abilities and effort, one should also take into account, for instance, the pressure agents might face when making their decisions. Existing literature has provided important evidence suggesting that even highly qualifed agents may perform worse when the stakes are very high or when they confront unusually high pressure. In this paper we study the degree of heterogeneity in agents' reactions to pressure. More precisely, we identify relative critical abilities with which professional tennis players' performance responds to the importance of a point. Adopting a natural definition of importance, the scoring rules of tennis generate significant variation in point importance. Using data from 12 years of the US Open tournament, we estimate the critical abilities for players in the tournaments controlling for serving and returning strengths. We then show that there is significant heterogeneity in critical abilities across players. Moreover, looking at professional rankings we find that this critical ability has a substantial impact on a player's career. These results suggest that when analyzing human behavior, beyond accounting for the fact that pressure may affect performance, it is also important to recognize that this effect may depend on the idiosyncrasies of each agent.
  • Friday 29 January 2010
    Campus Jourdan, bâtiment F, 1er étage, salle de Réunions (10h00-11h30)
    Nagore IRIBERRI (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona) : Relative Performance Feedback Information and Happiness
    Co-auteur(s) : Ghazala Azmat
  • Friday 22 January 2010
    Campus Jourdan, bâtiment F, 1er étage, salle de Réunions (10h00-11h30)
    Sabrina TEYSSIER (INRA, ALISS) : Experimental Evidence on Inequity Aversion and Self-Selection between Incentive Contracts
    Abstract
    When only group performance is observable, incentives depend on the distribution of payments between group members. This distribution differs between firms. In this paper, we analyze whether the coexistence of various group performance-based payment schemes on the labor market can be related to agents' heterogeneity. We test by a laboratory experiment whether agents self-select between a competitive and a revenue-sharing payment scheme. The theory predicts a sorting of agents based on their preferences and an increase of the efficiency when the payment schemes are freely chosen by agents. Data confirm the predictions. Low inequity averse agents self-select into the competitive scheme and they are more likely to choose it if their risk aversion is low. The efficiency is increasing when the payment schemes are freely chosen. The results go in favor of a exible labor market that leads to a better matching between compensation schemes and agents' preferences.
    JEL classification: C92, D03, J33, M52.
    Keywords: performance pay, incentives, self-selection, inequity aversion, competition, revenue-sharing.
  • Friday 15 January 2010
    Campus Jourdan, bâtiment F, 1er étage, salle de Réunions (10h00-11h30)
    Raphael GODEFROY (PSE, Paris) : Issue Selection in Committees: Theory and Experiment
    Co-auteur(s) : Eduardo Perez
    Abstract
    This paper studies selection rules, i.e. the procedures by which a committee chooses the issues to include on its agenda. The main ingredient of the model is that committee members are uncertain about their final preferences at the selection stage: they only know the probability that they will eventually prefer the proposal to the status quo. This probability is private information. Surprisingly, the more stringent the voting rule at the selection stage, the less voters are inclined to select an issue. The driving force is that when an agent conditions on being pivotal for selection, stiffening the selection rule causes an increase of the relative likelihood that the proposal will eventually pass when she prefers the status quo, compared to when she doesn't. The voting rule in the final stage has the opposite effect. Experiments with committees of nine members playing repeatedly indicate that players' strategies are consistent with these results, possibly after some learning.
  • Friday 8 January 2010
    Campus Jourdan, bâtiment F, 1er étage, salle de Réunions (10h00-11h30)
    Ori HEFFETZ (Cornell University, Ithaca) : Charitable Giving: The Effects of Exogenous and Endogenous Status
    Co-auteur(s) : Anat Bracha & Lise Vesterlund
    Abstract
    Social status can affect charitable giving both exogenously and endogenously. Exogenously, individuals may change their giving behavior as a result of being endowed with status. Endogenously, status-seeking individuals may give to charity to gain status. We conduct a charitable donation experiment that disentangles the two by varying (a) the social visibility of pre-donation performance and (b) the social visibility of the donation. Performance-visibility exogenously increases status of high-performers while decreasing it for low-performers, whereas donation-visibility enables individuals to endogenously gain status through their contributions. We find that exogenous status significantly increases donations among high performers. By contrast, our evidence of endogenous status-seeking behavior is at best weak.
  • Friday 18 December 2009
    CHANGEMENT : La séance est annulée.
  • Friday 11 December 2009
    Campus Jourdan, bâtiment F, 1er étage, salle de Réunions (10h00-11h30)
    Alpaslan AKAY (IZA, Bonn) : Sundays are blue: are not they? The Day of the Week Effect on Subjective Well-Being and Socio-Economic Status
    Co-auteur(s) : Peter Martinsson
    Abstract
    This paper analyses whether individuals are influenced by the day of the week when reporting subjective well-being. By using a large panel data set and controlling for observed and unobserved individual characteristics, we find a large day-of the-week effect. Overall, we find a ‘blue’ Sunday effect with the lowest level of subjective well-being. The day-of-the-week effect differs with certain socio-economic and demographic factors such as employment, marital status and age. The paper concludes with recommendations for future analyses of subjective well-being data and design of data collections.
    JEL Classification: C23, D60, I31
    Keywords: subjective well-being, day-of-the-week effect
  • Friday 4 December 2009
    (00h00-00h00)
    No seminar because conference on the economics of obesity at PSE
  • Friday 27 November 2009
    Campus Jourdan, bâtiment F, 1er étage, salle de Réunions (10h00-11h30)
    Matthias SUTTER (University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck) : Strategic sophistication of individuals and teams in experimental normal-form games
    Co-auteur(s) : Simon Czermak & Francesco Feri
    Abstract
    We present an experiment on strategic thinking and behavior of individuals and teams in oneshot normal-form games. Besides making choices, decision makers state their first-order beliefs about their opponent’s choice, and second-order beliefs about the opponent’s first order belief. We find that teams play Nash-strategies significantly more often, and their choices are more often a best reply to first order beliefs, something which teams also expect more often from their opponents. Using a maximum-likelihood error-rate model we find that teams can be classified as playing strategically in 62% of cases, while a majority of individuals (60%) plays non-strategically.
    JEL-classification: C72, C91, C92
    Keywords: Strategic thinking, beliefs, experiment, team decision making, individual decision making
  • Friday 20 November 2009
    Campus Jourdan, bâtiment F, 1er étage, salle de Réunions (10h00-11h30)
    Guillaume HOLLARD (PSE, Paris) : A shock therapy against the endowment effect
    Co-auteur(s) : Dirk Engelmann
    Abstract
    Simple exchange experiments have identified the fact that participants trade their endowment less frequently than standard demand theory predicts. List (2003) finds, however, that the most experienced dealers acting on a well functioning market are not subject to this “endowment effect”. Thus, it seems that a lot of market experience is needed to overcome the “endowment effect”. In order to understand the effect of market experience, we introduce a distinction between two types of uncertainty, choice uncertainty and trade uncertainty, which could both lead to an “endowment effect”. While List’s own explanation is related to choice uncertainty, we conjecture that trade uncertainty is important for the “endowment effect”. To test this conjecture, we design a simple experiment where the two treatments impact differently on trade uncertainty, while controlling for choice uncertainty. Supporting our conjecture, we find that “forcing” subjects to give away their endowment in a series of exchanges, eliminates the “endowment effect” in a subsequent test. We discuss why markets might not succeed in providing sufficient incentives for learning to overcome the “endowment effect”.
    JEL Classification: C91, D12
    Keywords: endowment effect, robustness, experimental economics
  • Friday 13 November 2009
    Campus Jourdan, bâtiment B, 2e étage, salle de Réunions (10h00-11h30)
    Georg WEIZSACKER (LSE, London) : Beliefs and actions in the trust game: Creating instumental variables to estimate the causal effect
    Abstract
    In many economic contexts, an elusive variable of interest is the agent's expectation about relevant events, e.g. about other agents' behavior. Recent experimental studies as well as surveys have asked participants to state their beliefs explicitly, but little is known about the causal relation between beliefs and other behavioral variables. This paper discusses the possibility of creating exogenous instrumental variables for belief statements, by shifting the probabilities of the relevant events. We conduct trust game experiments where the amount sent back by the second player (trustee) is exogenously varied by a random process, in a way that informs only the first player (trustor) about the realized variation. The procedure allows detecting causal links from beliefs to actions under plausible assumptions. The IV estimates indicate a significant effect, comparable to the connection between beliefs and actions that is apparent in OLS analyses.
  • From 25 June 2009 10:00 to 26 June 2009 11:30
    Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L'Hôpital, Paris 13°
    Salle 6e
    John List, University of Chicago
    TBA
  • Friday 12 June 2009 13:00-17:00
    Drazen Prelec - MIT
    Meta-knowledge and the Bayesian truth serum mechanism
  • Friday 5 June 2009 13:00-17:00
    Jim Andreoni - UCSD
    Diverging opinions
  • Thursday 4 June 2009 16:00-19:00
    Salle 314
    Lise Vesterlund - Pittsburgh
    Gender differences in bargaining: a field experiment
  • Friday 15 May 2009 10:00-11:30
    Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L'Hôpital, Paris 13°
    Salle 6e
    Arno Riedl, Maastricht University
    Norm enforcement in heterogeneous populations
  • Friday 3 April 2009 10:00-11:30
    Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L'Hôpital, Paris 13°
    Salle 6e
    Rupert Sausgruber, University of Innsbruck
    Honesty on the streets : a natural field experiment on newspaper purchasing.
  • Friday 13 March 2009 10:00-11:30
    Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L'Hôpital, Paris 13°
    Salle 6e
    Lionel Page, University of Westminster, London
    The momentum effect in competitions : field evidence from tennis matches
  • Friday 6 March 2009 10:00-11:30
    Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L'Hôpital, Paris 13°
    Salle 6e
    Peter Wakker, Rotterdam and Maastricht Universities
  • Friday 13 February 2009 10:00-11:30
    Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L'Hôpital, Paris 13°
    ATTENTION - SEMINAIRE REPORTE A UNE DATE ULTERIEURE
    Nagore Iriberri, Pompeu Fabra University
    TBA
  • Friday 6 February 2009 10:00-11:30
    Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L'Hôpital, Paris 13°
    Salle 6e
    Steffen Huck, University College of London
    Engineering Trust
  • Friday 30 January 2009 10:00-11:30
    Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L'Hôpital, Paris 13°
    Salle 6e
    Theo Offerman, University of Amsterdam
    How to subsidize contributions to public goods - Does the frog jump out of the boiling water?
  • Friday 16 January 2009 10:00-11:30
    Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L'Hôpital, Paris 13°
    Salle 6e
    Jean-Robert Tyran, University of Copenhaguen
    The Demand for Discrimination
  • Friday 12 December 2008 10:00-11:30
    Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L'Hôpital, Paris 13°
    Salle 6e
    Orif Heffetz, Cornell University
    Conspicuous Consumption and Expenditure Visibility : measurement and application
  • Friday 21 November 2008 10:00-11:30
    Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L'Hôpital, Paris 13°
    Salle 6e
    Graham Loomes, University of East Anglia
  • Thursday 20 November 2008 10:00-11:30
    Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L'Hôpital, Paris 13°
    Salle B.3.1
    Graham Loomes, University of East Anglia
    Séance Supplémentaire
  • Friday 14 November 2008 10:00-11:30
    Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L'Hôpital, Paris 13°
    Salle 6e
    Hilke Plassmann, INSEAD, Fontainebleau
    Neural basis of simple economic decision-making
  • Friday 17 October 2008 10:00-11:30
    Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L'Hôpital, Paris 13°
    Salle 6e
    Tibor Neugebauer, University of Luxembourg
    The Petersburg paradox : 300 years of introspection and experimental evidence at last

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