Suchergebnisse

Community currencies (CCs) are common social economy instruments for aligning market transactions with social commitments. They change incentives, encouraging trade within the CC network, but may also symbolize and thereby amplify users' commitment to social values of solidarity and cooperation. The behavioral effect of the second channel, moreover, is clouded by endogenous use of the CC: commitment encourages use, but does use also trigger commitment? We disentangle the direction of causality with a lab-in-the-field ultimatum game experiment, which confronts participants with a choice between more or less competitive responses. By exogenously varying the currency in which the game is played (CC or euros), we isolate the causal effect of the CC on behavior. Self-declared regular users of the currency are less competitive when playing in the CC than when playing in euros. This is not due to unobserved differences in the individuals, because when playing in euros, their behavior is the same as non-users'. Nor is it due to non-convertibility of the CC, as non-users' behavior is not affected by the currency. We therefore isolate the CC as a "trigger of cooperativeness" for those who have a base-level of commitment to it.

La protection de l'environnement passe par la mise en œuvre d'actions coûteuses, au profit de personnes parfois inconnues et éloignées dans le temps. Ces actions pourraient sembler irrationnelles, sauf dans le cas où un individu chercherait à protéger le bien-être de proches, dans de futures générations. Nous comparons expérimentalement deux situations d'exploitation d'une ressource commune : les individus extracteurs sont membres de générations qui se suivent, sans lien dynastique (1) ; les individus des diverses générations sont membres de dynasties (2). Les individus qui savent que leur décision d'extraction va affecter les membres de leur dynastie appartenant à des générations futures font une extraction significativement moindre que les autres.

AbstractFinancial stress scales need to be incorporated into the borrower selection procedure before providing a loan. The three financial stress scales that we examined have strong correlations, but the two involving at least eight questions are better for discriminating between poor and rich. The financial stress indicator that separates male and female students the most is whether financial problems interfere with relationships with other people (interference is more for men). Older students are less satisfied with their financial position and seem to think that their parents worry more about disappointing them for materialistic reasons.