Volume 21, Issue 4 - Special Issue: Experimental in Law and Economics, Part II

This pilot study explores the feasibility of using Quadratic Voting for Survey Research (QVSR) as an alternative to the traditional Likert scale in a municipal decision-making context. By observing decision-makers’ behavior and voting outcomes, the study provides descriptive evidence on how these two survey methodologies perform in practice. While standard democratic processes often overlook the intensity of citizen preferences, QVSR allows individuals to express preference strength using a limited credit system. In contrast, the Likert scale, though widely used, may be susceptible to response biases and assumptions about sincerity. Previous studies have demonstrated the theoretical and experimental promise of QVSR; this pilot extends that work by assessing its feasibility and practical implementation in a real-world policy environment. Conducted in the Gabba Ward municipality in Brisbane, Australia, the study randomly assigned citizens and policymakers to QVSR or Likert conditions and describes patterns in the alignment between citizen responses and councilor voting. The results are exploratory and intended to inform future, larger-scale evaluations of QVSR’s potential to support more nuanced and representative forms of democratic engagement.

In addition to campaign promises and clientelistic practices via particularized (non-programmatic) benefits to boost their chances of winning an election, politicians may also seek the endorsement of influential members of the society in exchange for benefits provided before the election or conditional on electoral success. As a starting point to analyze such exchanges, we construct a simple full-information contractual bilateral exchange game where particularized benefits are exchanged for an influencer’s costly action and derive conditions under which different forms of payment would be used. Using a framed laboratory experiment that exogenously varies the politician’s gain from winning and the influencer’s impact on the chance of success, we find that the number of exchanges is significantly lower than predicted by a model of purely self-interested behavior. When exchanges do occur, they overwhelmingly take place with winning-conditional payments. Our results are consistent with a model of inequity aversion, whereby influencers’ fairness concerns constrain influence buying, particularly when candidates’ gains from winning are high. We argue that knowledge of the politician’s potential rents, combined with other-regarding preferences among influencers, may limit influence buying.

This experimental paper provides evidence on the incidence of different third-party punishment institutions in the context of a game designed to represent simplified versions of specific, real-life situations. We begin with a benchmark scenario (which we will call “Baseline”), that involves the possibility of altruistic third-party punishment after playing a taking game. The “vertical control” treatment adds a second possible punisher who can confirm or overturn the initial decision. The “giving reasons” treatment requires the third party to provide reasons to motivate her/his choice. A fourth treatment combines both instruments. Thus, we manipulate our interest variables (“vertical control” and “giving reasons”) both one at a time and, eventually, in a combined format. The main result is that both instruments have a significant positive impact on the incidence of punishment. In contrast, the hybrid scenario does not further increase the frequency of punishment, seemingly due to a “mis-use” of the “giving reasons” requirement by arguing vis-à-vis the second instance to uphold the first-instance, non-punishment decision.

To align private and public interests in social dilemmas, formal regulations have been developed providing enforcement mechanisms to promote cooperation and decrease free riding. Although formal rules sanctioning free riders and rewarding cooperators work in some cases, they are costly to implement. In addition, unless individuals’ behavior is observed and external monitoring is high, these legally binding rules are not effective. In a 2 × 2 lab experimental design, this paper investigates whether a proverb reflecting an injunctive norm of cooperation can foster voluntarily cooperative behavior in a Voluntary Contribution Mechanism (VCM) with low monitoring and no punishment mechanisms. The utilized proverb is found to increase contribution. In addition, the findings show no significant difference between the proverb’s effect and the effect of a non-proverbial injunctive intervention. Moreover, social type is not found to have a moderating effect as there is no significant difference between the responses of prosocials and proselfs to the two injunctive interventions. The results of this paper imply that cultural proverbs could be used by policy makers as a soft low-cost intervention in social marketing campaigns.

Experiments on social norm interventions suggest that public dissemination of normative information, which creates common knowledge on a social norm, increases conformity to the social norm more effectively than privately disseminated information, regardless of other factors affecting norm conformity, such as group identity and heterogeneous endowments. We present an experimental test of the effect that the channel of dissemination – public versus private – has on norm conformity at different levels of group identity in a public-goods setting with heterogeneously endowed actors. Participants receive a normative message about the behavior that participants of a previous experiment identified as the “fairest.” We vary between strong and weak group identity, and public and private information, and record participants’ compliance with the norm. Our results suggest that the effect of public normative information depends on the salience of group identity and the initial endowment of individuals. At best, it has no effect on norm conformity. However, in the heterogeneous setting, it reduces norm conformity among those with lower initial endowments. This poses challenges for eliciting a behavioral change using normative information since providing public information may backfire.

The Islamic inheritance law puts women at a distributive disadvantage leading to gender inequality in wealth accumulation. Religiosity and patriarchy are often blamed for the persistence of gender inequality in Muslim-majority countries. Employing an online vignette experiment, we examine whether religious and pro-male preferences reinforce gender inequality in inheritance in Egypt. We find that religious individuals prefer to abide by the inheritance law and its distributive inequality. We also find that individuals with pro-male cultural beliefs prefer to avoid the inheritance law only selectively to protect the male distributive advantage. Put together, we find that both religiosity and pro-male cultural beliefs are impediments to achieving gender equality in inheritance in Egypt.