Suchergebnisse

Abstract
This paper investigates if economic theory can explain variations in piracy behavior between individuals and between countries. It is demonstrated that economic theory explains a notable part of the individual variation in a survey study. Individuals with a low net valuation of an original when a copy is available are more prone to engage in piracy than individuals with a higher valuation. Individuals with a low cost of obtaining and handling copies are also more engaged in piracy. The country-wise variation can also be explained by economic variables; GNI/capita and judicial efficiency explain a substantial part of this variation.

This paper analyses the case when the political struggle not is channeled through policy choices, but through what information to adopt. The paper presents a simple model to analyze collective decisions of adopting new information when different parties' payoffs are contingent upon the new information. In equilibrium we demonstrate that the adopted information is biased towards "political correctness" rather than being informative (in the Blackwell sense). These results may be relevant when designing decision mechanisms for institutions that are to be keen on new information.

Where does generalized trust—that is, the inclination to place trust in strangers—come from? Our claim is that in economic action, sources of generalized trust may not differ much from the sources of personalized trust. Contrary to a common assumption of a sharp distinction between personalized and generalized trust, we assert a likely spillover effect from relational exchange to a person's expectations in interacting with an anonymous other. Our research integrates behavioral measures elicited by a novel incentivized trust game with survey data using a random sample of 540 entrepreneurs of private industrial firms in the Yangzi delta region of China. We show that entrepreneurs with more experience in relational exchange display greater trust in strangers. Likewise, we find robust evidence of a positive association between beliefs in the effectiveness of community business norms and generalized trust.

It is well known in economics, law, and sociology that reputation costs in a closed network give insiders a feeling of being protected from bad behavior in their relations with one another. A person accustomed to doing business within a closed network is, therefore, likely to feel at unusual risk when asked to cooperate beyond the network because of absent reputation-cost security. It follows that business leaders in more closed networks should be less likely to cooperate beyond their network (Hypothesis 1 ). Success reinforces the status quo. Business leaders successful with a closed network associate their success with the safety of their network, so they should be even less likely to cooperate with a stranger (Hypothesis 2 ). We combine network data from a heterogeneous area probability survey of Chinese CEOs with a behavioral measure of cooperation to show strong empirical support for the two hypotheses. CEOs in more closed networks are less likely to cooperate beyond their network, especially those running successful businesses: successful CEOs in closed networks are particularly likely to defect against people beyond their network. The work contributes to a growing literature linking network structure with behavior: here, the closure that facilitates trust and cooperation within a network simultaneously erodes the probability of cooperation beyond the network, thereby reinforcing a social boundary around the network. Taking our results as a baseline, we close sketching new research on personality, homophily, network dynamics, and variation in the meaning of "beyond the network."

AbstractRecent experimental evidence suggests that noisy behavior correlates strongly with personal characteristics. Since decision noise leads to bias in most elicitation tasks, there is a risk of falsely interpreting noise-driven relationships as preference driven. This puts previous studies that found a negative relation between personality measures and risk aversion into perspective and in particular raises the question of how to achieve robust inference in this domain. This paper shows, by way of an economic experiment with subjects from all walks of life, that using structural estimation to model heterogeneity of noise in combination with a balanced design allows us to mitigate the bias problem. Our estimations show that cognitive ability is related to noisy behavior rather than risk preferences. We also find age and education to be strongly related to noise, but the personality characteristics obtained using the Big Five inventory are less related to noise and more robustly correlated to risk preferences.