Contributions in Merlin

Efficiency and symmetric treatment of agents are the primary goals of resource allocation in environments without transfers. Focusing on ordinal mechanisms in which no small group of agents can substantially change the allocations of others, we show that all asymptotically efficient, symmetric, and asymptotically strategy-proof mechanisms lead to the same allocations in large markets. In particular, many mechanisms - both well-known and newly developed - are allocationally equivalent. This equivalence is consistent with prior empirical findings that different mechanisms lead to similar allocations in school choice. We also show that uniform randomizations over deterministic efficient mechanisms are asymptotically efficient.

We incorporate externalities into the stable matching theory of two-sided markets. Extending the classical substitutes condition to allow for externalities, we establish that stable matchings exist when agent choices satisfy substitutability. Furthermore, we show that substitutability is a necessary condition for the existence of a stable matching in a maximal-domain sense and provide a characterization of substitutable choice functions. In addition, we establish novel comparative statics on externalities and show that the standard insights of matching theory, like the existence of side-optimal stable matchings and the deferred acceptance algorithm, remain valid despite the presence of externalities even though the standard fixed-point techniques do not apply.

School districts and other institutions allocating objects without the use of transfers tend to rely on mechanisms that only elicit agents’ ordinal preferences. The present note shows that the welfare loss imposed by only eliciting ordinal preferences can be arbitrarily large.

We present a novel design measuring a correlate of social preferences in a high-stakes setting. In the Big Robber Game, a "robber" can obtain large personal gains by appropriating the gains of a large group of "victims" as seen in recent corporate scandals. We observed that more than half of all robbers take as much as possible. At the same time, participants displayed standard, prosocial behavior in the Dictator, Ultimatum, and Trust games. That is, prosocial behavior in the small is compatible with highly selfish actions in the large, and the essence of corporate scandals can be reproduced in the laboratory even with a standard student sample. We show that this apparent contradiction is actually consistent with received social-preference models. In agreement with this view, in the experiment more selfish robbers also behaved more selfishly in other games and in a donation question. We conclude that social preferences are compatible with rampant selfishness in high-impact decisions affecting a large group.

A substantial share of university instruction happens in tutorial sessions—small group instruction given parallel to lectures. In this paper, we study whether instructors with a higher academic rank teach tutorials more effectively in a setting where students are randomly assigned to tutorial groups. We find this to be largely not the case. Academic rank is unrelated to students’ current and future performance and only weakly positively related to students’ course evaluations. Building on these results, we discuss different staffing scenarios that show that universities can substantially reduce costs by increasingly relying on lower-ranked instructors for tutorial teaching.

We investigate the effects of an institutional mechanism that incentivizes taxpayers to blow the whistle on collusive corruption and tax compliance. We explore this through a formal leniency program. In our experiment, we nest collusive corruption within a tax evasion framework. We not only study the effect of the presence of such a mechanism on behavior, but also the dynamic effect caused by the introduction and the removal of leniency. We find that in the presence of a leniency mechanism, subjects collude and accept bribes less often while paying more taxes, but there is no increase in bribe offers. Our results show that the introduction of the opportunity to blow the whistle decreases the collusion and bribe acceptance rate, and increases the collected tax yield. It also does not encourage bribe offers. In contrast, the removal of the institutional mechanism does not induce negative effects, suggesting a positive spillover effect of leniency that persists even after the mechanism has been removed.

Befragungen von Konsumenten, Steuerzahlern und Wählern werden in Wirtschaft und Politik häufig als Entscheidungsgrundlage herangezogen. Die Ergebnisse dieser Befragungen können somit großen Einfluss auf politische Entscheidungen und damit auf den Alltag vieler Menschen haben. Befragungen sind besonders dann wichtig und notwendig, wenn noch keine entsprechenden Verhaltensdaten oder Erfahrungswerte vorliegen. Helga Fehr-Duda und Robin Schimmelpfennig gehen der Frage nach, ob Angaben zur Zahlungsbereitschaft, die in hypothetischen Entscheidungssituationen gemacht werden, glaubwürdig und zuverlässig genug sind, um als Grundlage für unternehmerische und wirtschaftspolitische Entscheidungen zu dienen. Die Autoren zeigen anhand zweier neuer Studien, dass Ergebnisse hypothetischer Befragungen, wie beispielsweise einer Stated preference Befragung, signifikant vom Kontext der Entscheidungssituation abhängen. Es ist daher nicht möglich, allgemeine kontextunabhängige Aussagen zum Ausmaß der möglichen Fehleinschätzung von Zahlungsbereitschaften zu treffen. Die Autoren empfehlen, wann immer möglich Labor- oder Feldexperimente im relevanten Kontext mit realen monetären Anreizen durchzuführen. In jenen Fällen, in denen hypothetische Befragungen die einzige Möglichkeit der Datengewinnung darstellen, ist es unabdingbar, das Befragungsdesign möglichst anreizverträglich, realitätsnah und dem Anwendungskontext angemessen zu gestalten. Auftraggeber sollten auf die Einhaltung dieser Grundsätze bestehen, um möglichst valide Befragungsergebnisse zu erhalten.

There is vast heterogeneity in the human willingness to weigh others’ interests in decision making. This heterogeneity concerns the motivational intricacies as well as the strength of other-regarding behaviors, and raises the question how one can parsimoniously model and characterize heterogeneity across several dimensions of social preferences while still being able to predict behavior over time and across situations. We tackle this task with an experiment and a structural model of preferences that allows us to simultaneously estimate outcome-based and reciprocity-based social preferences. We find that nonselfish preferences are the rule rather than the exception. Neither at the level of the representative agent nor when we allow for several preference types do purely selfish types emerge in our sample. Instead, three temporally stable and qualitatively different other-regarding types emerge endogenously, i.e., without pre-specifying assumptions about the characteristics of types. When ahead, all three types value others’ payoffs significantly more than when behind. The first type, which we denote as strongly altruistic type, is characterized by a relatively large weight on others’ payoffs – even when behind – and moderate levels of reciprocity. The second type, denoted as moderately altruistic type, also puts positive weight on others’ payoff, yet at a considerable lower level, and displays no positive reciprocity, while the third type is behindness averse, i.e., puts a large negative weight on others’ payoffs when behind and behaves selfishly otherwise. We also find that there is an unambiguous and temporally stable assignment of individuals to types. In addition, we show that individual-specific estimates of preferences offer only very modest improvements in out-of-sample predictions compared to our three-type model. Thus, a parsimonious model with only three types captures the bulk of the information about subjects’ social preferences.

This paper examines the effect of an R&D-specific labor supply shock produced by the establishment of tertiary vocational education institutions teaching and conducting applied R&D, the Universities of Applied Sciences, on the R&D personnel of private firms. We apply a difference-in-differences model, exploiting a quasi-natural experiment in the 1990s in Switzerland, the staggered establishment of these institutions. Using repeated cross-sectional data from the Swiss Earnings Structure Survey, we can precisely measure the R&D personnel of private firms, i.e., how much R&D personnel a firm employs and how much a firm spends on its R&D personnel in terms of wages. The education-driven labor supply shock has positive effects on both the percentage of R&D personnel and the wages paid to this personnel. Our assessments of effect heterogeneity suggest that these effects are driven by firms with 50 to 99 employees and firms in the manufacturing sector increasing their R&D personnel.

Using a large-scale real effort experiment, we explore whether and how different peer assignment mechanisms affect worker performance and stress. Letting individuals choose whom to compare to increases productivity to the same extent as a targeted exogenous matching policy designed to maximize motivational spillovers. These effects are significantly larger than those obtained through random assignment and their magnitude is comparable to the impact of monetary incentives that increase pay by about 10 percent. A downside of targeted peer assignment is that, unlike endogenous peer selection, it leads to a large increase in stress. Using a combination of choice data, text analysis and simulations, we show that the key advantage of letting workers choose whom to compare to is that it allows those workers who want to be motivated to compare to a motivating peer while also permitting those for whom social comparisons have little benefits or are too stressful to avoid them. Finally, we provide evidence that social comparisons yield stronger motivational effects than comparable non-social goals.