Université de Lausanne
Ecole des HEC
Département d'économétrie et d'économie politique

Wednesday February 25, 2009, 10:00
Extranef, Dorigny, room 126

Christian THÖNI
(University of St-Gall)

'Kinked Conformism' in Voluntary Cooperation

 
Abstract
Field evidence suggests that people’s work morale depends on those of their co-workers. We are interested in understanding the behavioural logic of such “social interaction
effects”. We design a three-person gift-exchange experiment where workers can observeeach others’ effort levels and adjust their own effort if they so wish. Our design avoids
the “reflection problem” (Manski (1993)) which plagues identification of social interactioneffects. The one-shot nature of our experiment also excludes any strategic incentives
for changing efforts. We nevertheless observe many adjustments, most of them down to the lower effort level. We show that efforts are strategic complements rather than
strategicsubstitutes as predicted by various models of social preferences. Conformism seems to be the dominant motive behind the social interaction effects we observe.

Web site of the seminar (with paper online): http://www.hec.unil.ch/deep/evenements-english/e-sem-all-2008-09.htm