Suchergebnisse

This paper investigates experimentally how a group's structure affects its ethical behavior towards a passive outsider. We analyze one vertical and two horizontal structures (one requiring consensus, one implementing a compromise by averaging proposals). We also control for internal communication. The data support our main predictions: (1) horizontal, averaging structures are more ethical than vertical structures (where subordinates do not feel responsible) and than consensual structures (where responsibility is dynamically diffused); (2) communication makes vertical structures more ethical (subordinates with voice feel responsible); (3) with communication, vertical structures are more ethical than consensual structures (where in-group bias hurts the outsider). (JEL C92, D23, L21, M14)

This commentary is a face-to-face debate between two almost opposite positions regarding the application of genetic engineering in agriculture and food production. Seven questions on the potential benefits of the application of genetic engineering in agriculture and on the potentially adverse impacts on the environment and human health were posed to two scientists: one who is sceptical about the use of GMOs in Agriculture, and one who views GMOs as an important tool for quantitatively and qualitatively improving food production. ; Research at the Universitat de Lleida is supported by MICINN, Spain (BFU2007-61413); European Union Framework 7 Program-SmartCell Integrated Project 222716; European Union Framework 7 European Research Council IDEAS Advanced Grant Program-BIOFORCE; COST Action FA0804: Molecular farming: plants as a production platform for high value proteins; Centre CONSOLIDER on Agrigenomics funded by MICINN, Spain.

AbstractWe experimentally study a class of pie-sharing games with alternating roles from a decision-making perspective. For this, we consider a variant of a two-stage alternating-offer game which introduces an imbalance in the protagonists' bargaining powers. This game class enables us to investigate how exposure to risk and strategic ambiguity affects one's bargaining behaviour. Two structural econometric models of behaviour, anaïveand asophisticatedone, capture remarkably well the observed deviations from the game-theoretic benchmark. Our findings indicate, in particular, that a higher exposure to strategic ambiguity leads to a behaviour that is less responsive to the game's parameters and to distorted, yet consistent, beliefs about other's behaviour. We also find evidence of a backward-reasoning whereby first-stage decisions relate to the second-stage ones but which do not call for the counterfactual reasoning that characterises rationality in such settings.

Trabajo publicado como artículo en Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 61(2): 284-303 (2006).-- http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2004.12.007 ; The Bank of Spain uses a unique auction format to sell government bonds, which can be seen as a hybrid of a uniform and a discriminatory auction. For winning bids above the average winning bid, buyers are charged the average winning bid, otherwise they pay their respective bids. We report on an experiment that compares this auction format to the discriminatory format, used in most other countries, and to the uniform format. Our design is based on a common value model with multi-unit supply and two-unit demand. The results show significantly higher revenue with the Spanish and the uniform formats than with the discriminatory one, while volatility of prices over time is significantly lower in the discriminatory format than in the Spanish and uniform cases. Actual price dispersion is significantly larger in the discriminatory than in the Spanish. Our data also exhibit the use of bid-spreading strategies in all three designs. ; Financial support by the European Union from a TMR-ENDEAR network grant (FMRX-CT98-0238) and from the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Cultura (PB98-0465) is gratefully acknowledged.

Updated - please see paper 551.02 in this series. ; The Bank of Spain uses a unique auction format to sell government bonds, which can be seen as a hybrid of a uniform and a discriminatory auction. For winning bids above the average winning bid, buyers are charged the average winning bid, otherwise they pay their respective bids. We report an experiment that compares this auc-tion format to the discriminatory format used in most other countries. We use a common value model with multi-unit supply and two-unit demand. The results show significantly higher revenue with the Spanish format, while volatility of prices over time is lower with the discriminatory format. Our data also exhibit the use of bid-spreading strategies. ; Financial support by the European Union from a TMR-ENDEAR network grant (FMRX-CT98-0238) and from the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Cultura (PB98-0465) is gratefully acknowledged.

Bidding challenges learning theories. Even with the same bid, experiences vary stochastically: the same choice can result in either a gain or a loss. In such an environment, the question arises of how the nearly universally documented phenomenon of loss aversion affects the adaptive dynamics. We analyse the impact of loss aversion in a simple auction using the experienced‐weighted attraction model of learning. Our experimental results suggest that individual learning dynamics are highly heterogeneous and affected by loss aversion to different degrees. Apart from that, the experiment shows that loss aversion is not specific to rare decision‐making.

10 Pags.- 1 Tabl.- 6 Figs. Copyrights, the Authors. Plant Biotechnology Journal is published by Society for Experimental Biology and The Association of Applied Biologists and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ; Many metal transporters in plants are promiscuous, accommodating multiple divalent cations including some which are toxic to humans. Previous attempts to increase the iron (Fe) and zinc (Zn) content of rice endosperm by overexpressing different metal transporters have therefore led unintentionally to the accumulation of copper (Cu), manganese (Mn) and cadmium (Cd). Unlike other metal transporters, barley Yellow Stripe 1 (HvYS1) is specific for Fe. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this preference by constitutively expressing HvYS1 in rice under the control of the maize ubiquitin1 promoter and comparing the mobilization and loading of different metals. Plants expressing HvYS1 showed modest increases in Fe uptake, root-to-shoot translocation, seed accumulation and endosperm loading, but without any change in the uptake and root-to-shoot translocation of Zn, Mn or Cu, confirming the selective transport of Fe. The concentrations of Zn and Mn in the endosperm did not differ significantly between the wild-type and HvYS1 lines, but the transgenic endosperm contained significantly lower concentrations of Cu. Furthermore, the transgenic lines showed a significantly reduced Cd uptake, root-to-shoot translocation and accumulation in the seeds. The underlying mechanism of metal uptake and translocation reflects the down-regulation of promiscuous endogenous metal transporters revealing an internal feedback mechanism that limits seed loading with Fe. This promotes the preferential mobilization and loading of Fe, therefore displacing Cu and Cd in the seed. ; We acknowledge support from the European Research Council IDEAS Advanced Grant Program (BIOFORCE) to P.C., and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (MINECO; projects AGL2013-42175-R, co-financed with FEDER) and the Aragón Government (Group A03) to J.A. R.B was supported by a PhD fellowship from the University of Lleida, Spain. ; Peer reviewed