Essays in Behavioral Economics [védés előtt]

Kivonat, rövid leírás

In recent decades, behavioral and experimental economics have sig-nificantly influenced the broader discipline of economics. These sub-fields have revitalized interest in incorporating psychological dimen-sions into models of economic behavior. Beyond this conceptual shift, behavioral and experimental economics uses alternate meth-ods —namely: incentivized laboratory and field experiments—that allow for rigorous testing of theories and policy interventions be-fore rolling them out on large scale. Such experiments empower researchers to generate controlled data, moving beyond passive ob-servation of real-world phenomena and allowing for more rigorous causal analysis. This thesis aims to use these tools in four topics. While the topics are loosely connected, it demonstrates that the instruments available for behavioral and experimental economics can be relevant in various research areas. Chapter 1 demonstrates the use of field experiments in a classroom environment. Specifically, together with Barna Bakó and Éva Holb, we explore the effect loss aversion has on student’s academic performance in a university setting. The key idea being that individuals perceive losses stronger than gains of equal size Kahneman and Tversky, 1979, reframing students’ evalu-ation system so that it emphasizes losses from not performing well or not completing tasks might lead to improved academic perfor-mance. While loss aversion was analysed in several academic set-tings (Apostolova-Mihaylova et al., 2015; Faulk et al., 2019; Levitt et al., 2016; McEvoy, 2016; Smith et al., 2019) , the results are het-erogeneous: some find no effect in general but heterogeneous gender effects (Apostolova-Mihaylova et al., 2015), some find no heteroge-neous effects but relatively large treatment effects (Faulk et al., 2019; McEvoy, 2016; Smith et al., 2019), and some find negative effects (Bies-Hernandez, 2012). While our first aim is to clarify some of these findings, the novelty of our research design is that it allows us to test the novelty-effect of loss-aversion framing. That is: it might be that students perform differently due to the unorthodox nature of grading; later during the semester, the might find out that this is indeed only a reframing of the evaluation system, and they do not truly lose points in the process. If this is true, we expect the treatment effect to decrease over time. To our knowledge, we are the first to answer this question.