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.

Proposal to permit experimental artificial reefs inside and outside the Big Sycamore Canyon Ecological Reserve

(Document pdf contains 19 pages)

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).