Saturday, June 29, 2019

Socializing at Work & Evidence from a Field Experiment with Manufacturing Workers: How much are we willing to pay to work with friends

Park, Sangyoon. 2019. "Socializing at Work: Evidence from a Field Experiment with Manufacturing Workers." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 11 (3): 424-55. DOI: 10.1257/app.20160650

Abstract: Through a field experiment at a seafood-processing plant, I examine how working alongside friends affects employee productivity and how this effect is heterogeneous with respect to an employee's personality. This paper presents two main findings. First, worker productivity declines when a friend is close enough to socialize with. Second, workers who are higher on the conscientiousness scale show smaller productivity declines when working alongside a friend. Estimates suggest that a median worker is willing to pay 4.5 percent of her wage to work next to friends.

Bargaining in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), the effect of cost, amount of gift, reciprocity, and communication: Absence of inequity aversion

Bueno-Guerra, N., Völter, C. J., de las Heras, Á., Colell, M., & Call, J. (2019). Bargaining in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes): The effect of cost, amount of gift, reciprocity, and communication. Journal of Comparative Psychology, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/com0000189

Abstract: Humans routinely incur costs when allocating resources and reject distributions judged to be below/over an expected threshold. The dictator/ultimatum games (DG/UG) are two-player games that quantify prosociality and inequity aversion by measuring allocated distributions and rejection thresholds. Although the UG has been administered to chimpanzees and bonobos, no study has used both games to pinpoint their motivational substrate. We administered a DG/UG using preassigned distributions to four chimpanzee dyads controlling for factors that could explain why proposers’ behavior varied substantially across previous studies: game order, cost for proposers, and amount for recipients. Moreover, players exchanged their roles (proposer/recipient) to test reciprocity. Our results show that proposers offered more in the DG than in the nonsocial baseline, particularly when they incurred no cost. In UG, recipients accepted all above-zero offers, suggesting absence of inequity aversion. Proposers preferentially chose options that gave larger amounts to the partner. However, they also decreased their offers across sessions, probably being inclined to punish their partner’s rejections. Therefore, chimpanzees were not strategically motivated toward offering more generously to achieve ulterior acceptance from their partner. We found no evidence of reciprocity. We conclude that chimpanzees are generous rational maximizers that may not engage in strategic behavior.

Check also... Cognitive Reflection Test in Predicting Rational Behavior in the Dictator Game. Monika Czerwonka, Aleksandra Staniszewska, Krzysztof Kompa. In International Conference on Computational Methods in Experimental Economics CMEE 2017: Problems, Methods and Tools in Experimental and Behavioral Economics pp 301-312, https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2018/10/cognitive-reflection-was-positively.html

Advantageous Inequity Aversion Does Not Always Exist: The Role of Determining Allocations Modulates Preferences for Advantageous Inequity. Ou Li, Fuming Xu4 and Lei Wang. Front. Psychol., May 23 2018, https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2018/05/there-is-no-advantageous-inequity.html