Time discounting (delta) and pain anticipation: Experimental evidence

To be published in: Revista Internacional de Sociología (2011), Special Issue on Experimental and Behavioral Economics.

Personal identity. A theoretical and experimental analysis

Published as article in: Journal of Economic Methodology, 2010, vol. 17, issue 3, pages 261-275.

Do experimental subjects favor their friends?

Ideally we would like subjects of experiments to be perfect strangers so that the situation they face at the lab is not just part of a long run interaction. Unfortunately, it is not easy to reach those conditions and experimenters try to mitigate any effects from those out-of-the-lab relationships by, for instance, randomly matching subjects. However, even if this type of procedure is used, there is a positive probability that a subject may face a friend or an acquaintance. We find evidence that social proximity between subjects is irrelevant to experiment results in dictator games. Thus, although ideal conditions are not met, relations between subjects do not contaminate the results of experiments.

Superando los límites medioambientales de la empresa: Un estudio experimental del efecto del posicionamiento ecológico en la actitud hacia la marca

Ponencia presentada y defendida en el XI Congreso Internacional de la Asociación de Dirección y Economía de la Empresa (AEDEM), celebrado en París en septiembre de 2002.

Moral cleansing and moral licenses: experimental evidence

Research on moral cleansing and moral self-licensing has introduced dynamic considerations in the theory of moral behavior. Past bad actions trigger negative feelings that make people more likely to engage in future moral behavior to offset them. Symmetrically, past good deeds favor a positive self-perception that creates licensing effects, leading people to engage in behavior that is less likely to be moral. In short, a deviation from a “normal state of being” is balanced with a subsequent action that compensates the prior behavior. We model the decision of an individual trying to reach the optimal level of moral self-worth over time and show that under certain conditions the optimal sequence of actions follows a regular pattern which combines good and bad actions. We conduct an economic experiment where subjects play a sequence of giving decisions (dictator games) to explore this phenomenon. We find that donation in the previous period affects present decisions and the sign is negative: participants’ behavior in every round is negatively correlated to what they did in the past. Hence donations over time seem to be the result of a regular pattern of self-regulation: moral licensing (being selfish after altruist) and cleansing (altruistic after selfish).

Estudio de la trabeculectomía experimental mediante implante de PLGA como dispositivo de liberación controlada de fármacos

225 p. : il.

Contribution of Pannexin1 to Experimental Autoimmune Encephalomyelitis

Pannexin1 (Panx1) is a plasma membrane channel permeable to relatively large molecules, such as ATP. In the central nervous system (CNS) Panx1 is found in neurons and glia and in the immune system in macrophages and T-cells. We tested the hypothesis that Panx1-mediated ATP release contributes to expression of Experimental Autoimmune Encephalomyelitis (EAE), an animal model for multiple sclerosis, using wild-type (WT) and Panx1 knockout (KO) mice. Panx1 KO mice displayed a delayed onset of clinical signs of EAE and decreased mortality compared to WT mice, but developed as severe symptoms as the surviving WT mice. Spinal cord inflammatory lesions were also reduced in Panx1 KO EAE mice during acute disease. Additionally, pharmacologic inhibition of Panx1 channels with mefloquine (MFQ) reduced severity of acute and chronic EAE when administered before or after onset of clinical signs. ATP release and YoPro uptake were significantly increased in WT mice with EAE as compared to WT non-EAE and reduced in tissues of EAE Panx1 KO mice. Interestingly, we found that the P2X7 receptor was upregulated in the chronic phase of EAE in both WT and Panx1 KO spinal cords. Such increase in receptor expression is likely to counterbalance the decrease in ATP release recorded from Panx1 KO mice and thus contribute to the development of EAE symptoms in these mice. The present study shows that a Panx1 dependent mechanism (ATP release and/or inflammasome activation) contributes to disease progression, and that inhibition of Panx1 using pharmacology or gene disruption delays and attenuates clinical signs of EAE.

Experimental Economics Meets Language Choice

Roughly one half of World's languages are in danger of extinction. The endangered languages, spoken by minorities, typically compete with powerful languages such as En- glish or Spanish. Consequently, the speakers of minority languages have to consider that not everybody can speak their language, converting the language choice into strategic,coordination-like situation. We show experimentally that the displacement of minority languages may be partially explained by the imperfect information about the linguistic type of the partner, leading to frequent failure to coordinate on the minority language even between two speakers who can and prefer to use it. The extent of miscoordination correlates with how minoritarian a language is and with the real-life linguistic condition of subjects: the more endangered a language the harder it is to coordinate on its use, and people on whom the language survival relies the most acquire behavioral strategies that lower its use. Our game-theoretical treatment of the issue provides a new perspective for linguistic policies.