Talking Behind Your Back: Communication and Team Cooperation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Abbink ◽  
Lu Dong ◽  
Lingbo Huang
Keyword(s):  
Behavioral Economics ◽  
Decision Analysis ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Team Communication ◽  
Team Cooperation ◽  
Profit Allocation ◽  
Asymmetric Communication ◽  
Present Experimental Evidence

Communication is one of the most effective devices in promoting team cooperation. However, asymmetric communication sometimes breeds collusion and hurts team efficiency. Here, we present experimental evidence showing that excluding one member from team communication hurts team cooperation; the communicating partners collude in profit allocation against the excluded member, and the latter reacts by exerting less effort. Allowing the partners to reach out to the excluded member partially restores cooperation and fairness in profit allocation, but it does not stop the partners from talking behind that member’s back even when they could have talked publicly. The partners sometimes game the system by tricking the excluded member into contributing but then grabbing all profits for themselves. This paper was accepted by Axel Ockenfels, behavioral economics and decision analysis.

Moral Perceptions of Advised Actions

2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (8) ◽  
pp. 3904-3927 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas C. Coffman ◽  
Alexander Gotthard-Real
Keyword(s):  
Behavioral Economics ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Relational Contract ◽  
Suggestive Evidence ◽  
Present Experimental Evidence

Can an organization avoid blame for an unpopular action when an adviser advises it to do it? We present experimental evidence suggesting this is the case—advice to be selfish substantially decreases punishment of being selfish. Further, this result is true despite advisers’ misaligned incentives, known to all: Through a relational contract incentive, advisers are motivated to tell the decision makers what they want to hear. Through incentivized elicitations, we find suggestive evidence that advice moves punishment by affecting beliefs of how necessary the selfish action was. In follow-up treatments, however, we show advice does not decrease punishment solely through a beliefs channel. Advice not only changes beliefs about what happened, but also the perceived morality of it. Finally, in treatments in which advisers are available, the data suggest selfish decision makers act more selfishly. This paper was accepted by Axel Ockenfels, behavioral economics.

scholarly journals The Attraction and Compromise Effects in Bargaining: Experimental Evidence

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Galeotti ◽  
Maria Montero ◽  
Anders Poulsen
Keyword(s):  
Behavioral Economics ◽  
Decision Analysis ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Attraction Effect ◽  
Compromise Effect

We experimentally investigate, in an unstructured bargaining environment with commonly known money payoffs, the attraction effect and compromise effect (AE and CE) in bargaining, namely, a tendency for bargainers to agree to an intermediate option (CE) or to an option that dominates another option (AE). We conjecture that the relevance of the AE and CE in bargaining is constrained by how focal the feasible agreements’ payoffs are. We indeed observe that there are significant AEs and CEs, but these effects are mediated by the efficiency and equality properties of the feasible agreements. Due to the allure of equality, the effects are harder to observe when an equal earnings contract is available. Decoys are more effective in shifting agreements from a very unequal contract to a less unequal one rather than the reverse. This paper was accepted by Yuval Rottenstreich, behavioral economics and decision analysis.

Self-Interested Giving: The Relationship Between Conditional Gifts, Charitable Donations, and Donor Self-Interestedness

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Chao ◽  
Geoffrey Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Decision Analysis ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Laboratory Experiments ◽  
Self Report ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Charitable Donations ◽  
Prosocial Motives ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Other Regarding ◽  
The Relationship

Nonprofits regularly use conditional “thank you” gifts to entice prospective donors to give, yet experimental evidence suggests that their effects are mixed in practice. This paper uses multiple laboratory experiments to test when and why thank you gifts vary in effectiveness. First, we demonstrate that although gifts often increase donations to charities that donors did not rate highly, many of the same gifts had no effects or negative effects for charities that prospective donors already liked. We replicate these findings in a second experiment that uses a different range of charity and gift options as well as different measures of participant perceptions of a charity. We also find that making gifts optional, as is common in fundraising campaigns, does not eliminate these negative gift effects. In additional experiments, we directly test for donor motives using self-report and priming experiments. We find that thank you gifts increase (decrease) the weight that donors place on self-interested (prosocial) motives, leading to changes in donation patterns. Altogether, our results suggest that practitioners may find gifts more useful when appealing to donors not already familiar with or favorably inclined to their charity, such as during donor acquisition campaigns. They may be less useful when appealing to recent donors or others who already favor the charity, in part because the gift may activate mindsets or norms that emphasize self-interested motives instead of more prosocial, other-regarding motives. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, decision analysis.

Convergence and intonation: historical evidence from Buenos Aires Spanish

2004 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURA COLANTONI ◽  
JORGE GURLEKIAN
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Contrastive Focus ◽  
Italian Immigration ◽  
Early Peak ◽  
Intonational Phrases ◽  
Pitch Accents ◽  
Present Experimental Evidence

In this paper we present experimental evidence showing that Buenos Aires Spanish differs from other Spanish varieties in the realization of pre-nuclear pitch accents and in the final fall in broad focus declarative utterances. Whereas other Spanish varieties have been described consistently as showing late peak alignments, Buenos Aires Spanish displays early peak alignments. The alignment pattern found in Buenos Aires broad focus declarative utterances is not totally foreign to Spanish: it is attested in a quite different function, i.e. to signal contrastive focus. In addition, Buenos Aires Spanish also seems to differ from other Spanish varieties in the realization of the intonation contour in utterance-final intonational phrases, where a pronounced tendency for down-stepped peaks is observed. We argue that these patterns, which emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, and coincided with the peak of Italian immigration, are due to a combination of direct and indirect transfer from Italian. As a result, two intonational systems that were typologically similar before contact took place (Hualde, 2002) became more similar after contact, in what can be interpreted as a case of convergence.

scholarly journals Human Cooperation When Acting Through Autonomous Machines

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (9) ◽  
pp. 3482-3487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Celso M. de Melo ◽  
Stacy Marsella ◽  
Jonathan Gratch
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Autonomous Vehicles ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Collective Interest ◽  
Intelligent Machines ◽  
Cooperative Society ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Autonomous Machines ◽  
Present Experimental Evidence

Recent times have seen an emergence of intelligent machines that act autonomously on our behalf, such as autonomous vehicles. Despite promises of increased efficiency, it is not clear whether this paradigm shift will change how we decide when our self-interest (e.g., comfort) is pitted against the collective interest (e.g., environment). Here we show that acting through machines changes the way people solve these social dilemmas and we present experimental evidence showing that participants program their autonomous vehicles to act more cooperatively than if they were driving themselves. We show that this happens because programming causes selfish short-term rewards to become less salient, leading to considerations of broader societal goals. We also show that the programmed behavior is influenced by past experience. Finally, we report evidence that the effect generalizes beyond the domain of autonomous vehicles. We discuss implications for designing autonomous machines that contribute to a more cooperative society.

Dark Soliton Formation for Light-Induced Waveguiding in Photorefractive inP:Fe

1997 ◽  
Vol 484 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Chauvet ◽  
S. A. Hawkins ◽  
G. J. Salamo ◽  
M. Segev ◽  
D. F. Bliss ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Steady State ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Dark Soliton ◽  
Screening Solitons ◽  
Present Experimental Evidence

AbstractWe present experimental evidence for the observation of steady-state dark photorefractive screening solitons trapped in bulk InP:Fe.

Phonotactic c(l)ues to Bantu noun class disambiguation

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Braver ◽  
Wm. G. Bennett
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Bantu Language ◽  
Noun Classes ◽  
Noun Class ◽  
Present Experimental Evidence

AbstractWhile a number of phonologists assume that phonotactics can provide clues to abstract morphological information, this possibility has largely gone unconsidered in work on Bantu noun classes. We present experimental evidence from isiXhosa (a Bantu language of the Nguni family, from South Africa), showing that speakers make use of root phonotactics when assigning noun classes to nonce words. Nouns in Xhosa bear class-indicating prefixes, but some of these prefixes are homophonous – and therefore ambiguous. Our findings show that when speakers are presented with words that have prefixes ambiguous between two classes, phonotactic factors can condition them to treat the nouns as one class or the other. This suggests that noun class (and other abstract morphological information) is not only stored in the lexicon, but is also redundantly indicated by phonotactic clues.

scholarly journals Uncalculating cooperation is used to signal trustworthiness

2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (31) ◽  
pp. 8658-8663 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jillian J. Jordan ◽  
Moshe Hoffman ◽  
Martin A. Nowak ◽  
David G. Rand
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
Ethical Principles ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
Present Experimental Evidence ◽  
Do So

Humans frequently cooperate without carefully weighing the costs and benefits. As a result, people may wind up cooperating when it is not worthwhile to do so. Why risk making costly mistakes? Here, we present experimental evidence that reputation concerns provide an answer: people cooperate in an uncalculating way to signal their trustworthiness to observers. We present two economic game experiments in which uncalculating versus calculating decision-making is operationalized by either a subject’s choice of whether to reveal the precise costs of cooperating (Exp. 1) or the time a subject spends considering these costs (Exp. 2). In both experiments, we find that participants are more likely to engage in uncalculating cooperation when their decision-making process is observable to others. Furthermore, we confirm that people who engage in uncalculating cooperation are perceived as, and actually are, more trustworthy than people who cooperate in a calculating way. Taken together, these data provide the first empirical evidence, to our knowledge, that uncalculating cooperation is used to signal trustworthiness, and is not merely an efficient decision-making strategy that reduces cognitive costs. Our results thus help to explain a range of puzzling behaviors, such as extreme altruism, the use of ethical principles, and romantic love.

Optical Investigations of Symmetry Breaking in GaInP2

1990 ◽  
Vol 198 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Mascarenhas ◽  
Sarah Kurtz ◽  
A. Kibbler ◽  
J.M. Olsonsolar
Keyword(s):  
Band Structure ◽  
Symmetry Breaking ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Band Gap ◽  
Vapor Phase ◽  
Vapor Phase Epitaxy ◽  
Spontaneous Breaking ◽  
Cubic Symmetry ◽  
Gaas Substrates ◽  
Present Experimental Evidence

ABSTRACTWe present experimental evidence for the spontaneous breaking of cubic symmetry in the band structure of films of Ga0 52 1n0 48P grown by organomeltallic vapor phase epitaxy on (100) GaAs substrates. We show how this effect is related to the spontaneous ordering of the alloy, and its correlation with the anomalous lowering of the band-gap observed in these films.

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