Three essays on behavioral and experimental economics

• Main Author: Li, Yupeng
• Other Authors: He Tai-Sen
• Format: Thesis-Doctor of Philosophy
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
• Subjects: Social sciences::Economic theory::Microeconomics
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/152388
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This thesis consists of three essays on behavioral and experimental economics. In Chapter 1, we study discrimination on the basis of national origin and in-group favoritism in Singaporean by exploring how the group identity discernible in a speaker’s accent affects trust. In the trust game, Singaporean Chinese senders were asked to listen to audio clips in with responders with either a Singaporean Chinese or a Mainland Chinese accent read on a two-sentence script before they would decide how much money to send. We also used the strategy method to elicit the senders’ beliefs about the trustworthiness of responders with a Mainland Chinese accent versus those with a Singaporean Chinese accent. We found that Singaporean senders tended to place more trust in responders with a Mainland Chinese accent than they did in responders with a Singaporean Chinese accent. We explain this difference on the basis of the Singaporean senders’ beliefs about trustworthiness: they believed that people with a Mainland Chinese accent would return more money to them than their in-group Singaporean counterparts. To bolster our findings, we confirmed in a separate experiment that the difference in response to the accents was not due to the speed of speech or vocal pitch. In Chapter 2, we experimentally examine how trustee identity disclosure affects trustor trust behavior in an online environment on WeChat (a Chinese social media platform). We manipulated identity disclosure between subjects by varying the trustees' WeChat account names and the context of their greetings 4 toward trustors in a group chat. We found that the trustors have a lower degree of trust in the trustees with disclosed names than the anonymous trustees, which contradicts the common intuition that identity disclosure contributes to prosocial behavior. We complemented our online WeChat experiment with an additional experiment in the lab to confirm the difference was not caused by either the trustors' stake levels or the trustees' WeChat profile pictures. Our study has direct real-world applications, especially in a world where increasingly more transactions and interactions are processed in an anonymous online environment. In Chapter 3, we propose and examine the de-biasing effect of self-distancing on loss aversion. In a laboratory setting, subjects made a set of binary decisions on whether to participate in a mixed gamble. Borrowing from the psychological literature, we manipulated the degree of self-distancing through the use of personal pronouns. We administered four treatment conditions —“I,” “You,” “No Pronoun,” and “Participant”—and subtly embedded this linguistic manipulation in the description of the payoff outcomes. Our results show that people exhibited a lower degree of loss aversion when the payoff information was conveyed using a pronoun that induced a higher level of self-distancing. Females were so much more responsive than were males to these subtle linguistic cues that the gender difference in loss aversion was closed in the two self-distanced conditions. The results have important theoretical and policy implications.