Social status and group norms: Indirect reciprocity in a repeated helping experiment

In the economic literature, reciprocity is typically studied in situations of repeated interaction between two individuals. It refers to one individual rewarding kind acts of the other or punishing hostile acts. In contrast, this paper studies indirect reciprocity, where a cooperative action is rewarded by a third actor, not involved in the original exchange. We provide experimental evidence on indirect reciprocity. The experiment is based on the ‘repeated helping game’ developed by Nowak and Sigmund (J. Theoret. Biol. 194 (1998) 561; Nature 393 (1998) 573), involving random pairing in large groups. Pairs consist of a donor and a recipient. Donors decide whether or not to provide costly ‘help’ to the recipients they are matched with, based on information about the recipient's behavior in encounters with third parties. We observe clear evidence of indirect reciprocity. Many decision-makers respond to the information about previous decisions (whether or not to help others) of the recipients. In our experiments, this indirect reciprocity is largely based on norms about how often the recipient should have helped others in the past. We show that these norms develop similarly within groups of interacting subjects, but distinctly across groups. This leads to the emergence of group norms.     

Does seeing more deeply into a game increase one’s chances of winning?

The substantively rational value of the games studied in this paper does not help predict subject performance in the experiment at all. An accurate model must account for the cognitive ability of the people playing the game. This paper investigates whether the variation in measured rationality bounds is correlated with the probability of winning when playing against another person in games that exceed both players’ estimated rationality bound. Does seeing deeper into a game matter when neither player can see to the end of the game? Subjects with higher measured bounds win 63 percent of the time and the larger the difference the more frequently they win.     

Existence of a competitive equilibrium in a one sector growth model with heterogeneous agents and irreversible investment

Summary. We prove existence of a competitive equilibrium in a version of a Ramsey (one sector) model in which agents are heterogeneous and gross investment is constrained to be non negative. We do so by converting the infinite-dimensional fixed point problem stated in terms of prices and commodities into a finite-dimensional Negishi problem involving individual weights in a social value function. This method allows us to obtain detailed results concerning the properties of competitive equilibria. Because of the simplicity of the techniques utilized our approach is amenable to be adapted by practitioners in analogous problems often studied in macroeconomics. Received: September 13, 2001; revised version: December 9, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" We are grateful to Tapan Mitra for pointing out errors as well as making very valuable suggestions. Thanks are due to Raouf Boucekkine and Jorge Duran for additional helpful discussions. We also thank an anonymous referee for his/her helpful comments. The second author acknowledges the financial support of the Belgian Ministry of Scientific Research (Grant ARC 99/04-235 “Growth and incentive design”) and of the Belgian Federal Goverment (Grant PAI P5/10, “Equilibrium theory and optimization for public policy and industry regulation”). Correspondence to: C. Le Van     

Selection dynamics and adaptive behavior without much information

This paper uses the experimental method to investigate behavior in a coordination game when the information available to subjects is limited to their feasible choices and their experienced payoffs. In the experiment subjects converge to an absorbing state at rates that are orders of magnitude faster than reinforcement learning algorithms, but slower than under complete information. This state is very close to a mutual best response outcome. All cohorts converged to the market statistic predicted by the interior equilibrium regardless of the information conditions or the stability conditions. Eric Battalio programmed the graphical user interface. The National Science Foundation and Texas Advanced Research Program provided financial support. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the Texas Advanced Research Program.     

Competitive supply behavior when price information is fuzzy

The theory of fuzzy sets is applied to the output decisions of a price-taking firm facing imprecise information about expected future prices. Accepting risk resulting from the randomness of prices, the manager is interested in expected profits only. Since the set of possible expected-price vectors is fuzzy, a suitable defuzzification strategy is defined in analogy to the pessimism-optimism index proposed by L. Hurwicz. It depends on the manager's willingness to accept surprises resulting from a deviation of the true expected prices from the values that guided output decisions. Despite a linear cost function, well specified solutions to the optimization problem are possible without resorting to capacity constraints.     

Temporary Liaisons: The Commitment of ‘Temps’ Towards Their Agencies*

abstract The majority of research on organizational commitment has focused on commitment in traditional, ongoing and open‐ended relationships. The commitment of employees in non‐standard work arrangements such as temporary employment has been subject to much less theoretical and empirical investigation. In this study, we examine the affective and continuance commitment of temporary workers towards their agency and its determinants. We distinguish two groups of determinants: the process by which the temporary worker chose a particular agency and the support provided by the agency. The findings can be summarized as follows: (1) affective commitment among temps is generally higher than their continuance commitment; (2) having more alternative agencies to choose from (i.e., volition) does not enhance the commitment of temporary workers; (3) a public choice for a particular agency raises both types of commitment, whereas the perceived agency dependence created by the choice increases continuance, but not affective commitment; and (4) both types of commitment are positively influenced by agency supportiveness, reflected in the way the agency deals with problems, the career support it provides, and the way it keeps in close contact with its temporary workers. Finally, the results suggest that factors raising affective commitment may ‘spill over’ to increase continuance commitment.     

Popularising Delphi method

The article reports on a methodical part of a combined substantive and methodical investigation experimenting with a new type of Policy Delphi method. The common problem defined for both parts was the question whether Delphi method could be transformed in an instrument of controlling technological change by employees. The question was answered positively by the participating (bank) employees, all union members engaged with an automatisation project, themselves. Self rating scales, an evaluation questionnaire and numerous data collected about the research process showed that the most relevant social categories of participants managed to serve as “experts” according to the high levels of cognition, effort, involvement and self-confidence required in a Delphi research project. Participants with low job level, women and non-trained union members joined in very well. The special steps required to broaden a successful participation of all categories, particular methods and techniques of information transmitting questioning and reporting, did not violate the quality of scientifically valid information gathering. So the result was a practical and scientific instrument.     

Municipal welfare functions

In this paper the concept of a municipal welfare function is defined. It reflects the evaluation by local authorities of several levels of local expenditures. On the basis of an extensive survey among all Dutch municipal authorities these functions are estimated for about 550 Dutch municipalities with respect to total expenditures and differentiated with respect to several portfolios, like public works, education, etc. The variation of the estimated municipal welfare parameters is explained by objectively measurable municipal characteristics like the number of the inhabitants, age distribution of inhabitants and houses, number of unemployed, regional situation.     

Retrospective questions: data quality,task difficulty,and the use of a checklist

Data from a national panel study with waves in 1987 and 1991 (N=1257), present evidence of the low accuracy of responses to retrospective questions, concerning both attitudes and behaviour. Applying a split ballot design, it is investigated whether using a checklist improves the response accuracy for a retrospective question about one single event: how respondents (N=363) did obtain the job they had four years ago. Furthermore interaction effects of ‘task difficulty’ are examined. The response accuracy indeed increases by using a checklist; however, this increase is not statistically significant. The expected increase of the checklist effect with higher ‘task difficulty’ appears for longer recall intervals, but not for more frequent changes of jobs. It turned out that for male respondents all the predicted effects are indeed clearly present. But for female respondents the checklist appeared to have no effect, irrespective of the task difficulty. A tentative explanation for this unexpected gender effect is suggested by pointing at indications that the male and female respondents differed in the way they obtained their job.