Suchergebnisse

Do politico-economic systems influence how control affects motivation? We hypothesize that control aversion, meaning crowding-out of intrinsic motivation due to enforcement, has evolved less under the coercive regime of East Germany than under the liberal regime of West Germany. We test this hypothesis in a large-scale internet study with subjects of different generations. The core of our study is a repeated principal-agent game where the principal can control the agent by implementing a minimal effort requirement before the agent chooses an effort costly to her but beneficial to the principal. We find that control aversion is largely stronger among West than among East Germans. The differences are significant and systematic for older Germans of the working population, never for younger Germans of the working population, and only in specific cases for students. Our findings suggest that for East Germans who have been socialized under a coercive regime, the experience of a liberal regime does not make them abandon completely the control-related preferences they have acquired earlier. Differences in reactions to control are vanishing in younger generations who essentially grew up in reunified Germany. More control aversion in the West is driven by more frequent control averse choices, while the strength of reactions to control is similar in both parts of Germany. Surprisingly, intrinsic motivation in the absence of control is very similar among East and West Germans. Our data suggest that control preferences are affected by the nature of the politico-economic system. However, this effect is only short-lived.

The payoff of actions is estimated and the resulting empirical payoff is controlled for in regression analyses to formulate a test of rational expectations in information cascade experiments. We show that the empirical payoff of actions is a function of estimates of choice probabilities and estimates of the information parameters of the game. We introduce an alternative empirical payoff of actions with true values of the information parameters. Our improved measure of the success of social learning confirms that rational expectations are violated, but deviations from rational expectations are statistically significantly smaller than in Weizsacher (2010). (JEL D82, D83, D84)

This paper reports results of an experiment designed to analyze the link between risky decisions made by couples and risky decisions made separately by each spouse. We estimate both the spouses and the couples' degrees of risk aversion, we assess how the risk preferences of the two spouses aggregate when they make risky decisions and we shed light on the dynamics of the decision process that takes place when couples make risky decisions. We find that, far from being fixed, the balance of power within the household is malleable. In most couples, men have, initially, more decision-making power than women but women who ultimately implement the joint decisions gain more and more power over the course of decision making.