Payment Of Subjects Research Articles

Estimating Social Preferences Using Stated Satisfaction: Novel Support for Inequity Aversion

In this paper, we use stated satisfaction to estimate social preferences: subjects report their satisfaction with payment-profiles that hold their own payment constant while varying another subject's payment. This approach yields significant support for the inequity aversion model of Fehr and Schmidt (1999). This model is among the most renowned in behavioral economics, positing a generalized aversion to inequality that is stronger when one's own payoff is lower–rather than higher–than others'; i.e., is stronger than guilt. While aggregate-level estimates based on revealed preferences in laboratory games have supported the model, the assumption that guilt is stronger than envy is often violated at the individual level. This paradox may be due to limitations of the revealed-preference approach. An advantage of avoiding games is that eliciting stated satisfaction is relatively easy to implement and is less prone to being confounded with motives like reciprocity; also the absence of tradeoffs between own and others' payoffs is cognitively less demanding for subjects. Our unstructured approach does not limit the expression of social preferences to inequity aversion, yet our methodology yields significant support for it. At the individual level, 86% of subjects exhibit at least as strong envy as guilt, and 76% (65%) of subjects weakly (strongly) adhere to the model. Our individual-level estimates are robust to changing the value of one's own constant payment and to changing the range of the other subject's payments. Methodologically, eliciting satisfaction can be an easy-to-implement complement to choice-based preference-measures in contexts other than social preferences that are of interest to economists.

Behavioral Economic Phenomena in Decision-Making for Others

We examine whether biases identified in the behavioral-economics literature apply in decision-making for others (DMfO). We conduct a laboratory experiment in which subjects make decision on behalf of themselves and others in eighteen tasks that measure the following biases: present-bias in time preferences, reflection effect in risk preferences, ambiguity aversion, decoy effect, anchoring bias, endowment effect, and identifiable-victim bias. In our experiment, DMfO is DMfO simpliciter: unincentivized decisions made by one individual on behalf of another - the individual making decisions faces no direct costs or benefits when engaging in DMfO (as they would in a principal-agent framework or with bequest motives), and DMfO is not framed as giving advice or guessing behavior. We identify the following self-other discrepancies: (i) willingness to pay is higher in DMfO than in decisions for oneself in tasks associated with the anchoring bias, endowment effect, and identifiable-victim bias; and (ii) the propensity to give uninterpretable responses is higher in DMfO than in decisions for oneself. We also find order effects, with DMfO more similar to decisions for oneself when it follows them. Lastly, in response to open-ended items soliciting self-reports of their DMfO, most subjects report having followed some version of the Golden Rule (e.g., deciding for others as they would for themselves) or having tried to maximize the other subject's payment or utility; very few subjects report motivations that can be construed as rivalrous.

RESEARCH ON SOCIAL VALUE MEASUREMENT OF GLOBAL WARMING AND HEAT ISLAND COUNTERMEASURES APPLIED CONJOINT ANALYSIS

A systematical field survey applied Conjoint Analysis (CA) concerned on two specified social issues; global warming and heat island problems is conducted. We applied the so-called web-site survey to secure both quantity and quality of a series of acquired data sets. Both obtained Marginal Willing to Pay (MWTP) for the global warming and heat island issues seems plausible. Interestingly, it is observed an evident tendency that younger subjects incline to pay more than older subjects, which implies younger people paying much attention to the environmental issues. We found that the level range of payment in a questionnaire significantly affects MWTP, which means how design a payment range would bring considerable bias in some cases. Also a principle problem whether a subject's payment was questioned by explicit as a form of additional payment to the public or implicit as a form of re-allocation of already-collected tax from the people, is observed significantly influential in the MWTP. The result also suggests that three-choice type CA seems better than pairwise type CA to obtain plausible MWTP when a questionnaire relates to a certain ideal issue that is difficult for subjects to understand its trade-off structure in proper way.

Social Comparison Affects Reward-Related Brain Activity in the Human Ventral Striatum

Whether social comparison affects individual well-being is of central importance for understanding behavior in any social environment. Traditional economic theories focus on the role of absolute rewards, whereas behavioral evidence suggests that social comparisons influence well-being and decisions. We investigated the impact of social comparisons on reward-related brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). While being scanned in two adjacent MRI scanners, pairs of subjects had to simultaneously perform a simple estimation task that entailed monetary rewards for correct answers. We show that a variation in the comparison subject's payment affects blood oxygenation level-dependent responses in the ventral striatum. Our results provide neurophysiological evidence for the importance of social comparison on reward processing in the human brain.