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Abstract:
Our experimental study compares the effectiveness of three reputation mechanisms believed to enhance cooperation. Groups of 14 subjects repeatedly select partners, play two-person prisoner's dilemmas, and rely only on individual experience to find trustworthy exchange partners in the baseline condition. The local condition represents emergent, bottom-up networks that allow partners to voluntarily share recommendations. The central condition represents designed, top-down institutions that allow wide dissemination of recommendations provided voluntarily. Surprisingly, the greater provision and use of information in the local condition supports the highest level of cooperation, suggesting an unrecognized advantage of exchange networks over centralized institutions in credibility and information provision.

Abstract:
Public assistance programs usually have two distinct effects: they equalize wealth in society, but they also cushion people against the effects of random catastrophic events, like natural disasters and serious illnesses. Thus, citizens may support these programs because they desire equality and fairness, but also because they wish to enjoy the protections of social insurance. We conduct a laboratory experiment to determine how differences in the environment can change a person's preference for income redistribution programs through these two avenues of influence. We find that survey measures of an individual's economic ideology are only effective predictors of a person's preference for income redistribution in our experiment when there is a moderate chance of a catastrophic income loss. When the chance of loss is very low or very high, liberals and conservatives do not systematically differ in their preference for redistribution. Our findings support the idea that ideology is primarily a reflection of attitudes toward the role of luck in life outcomes and whether society should correct for the whims of chance, and that elements in our experimental environment triggered this difference.

redistribution, welfare, tax, experiment

Abstract:
In this paper, I present and test a method by which executive branch politicians and their appointees can control a career administrative bureaucracy. A formal model predicts that this strategy, competitive budgeting, can be effective at inducing effort from bureaucrats even when they enjoy extensive civil service protections and despite executives’ limited and error-prone ability to monitor bureaucratic output. A laboratory experiment that tests the incentive scheme finds that subjects exert more effort than predicted and do not lower their effort when working to benefit ideologically opposed groups. The experiment also shows that subjects exert less effort when competing against those who share their political ideology (and exert more effort when competing against those who do not). The results suggest that budget-based incentives might make ideologically diverse workforces (as produced by the merit civil service system) as loyal to the executive as ideologically homogeneous workforces (produced by patronage).

principal agent, bureaucracy, tournament, budgeting, experiment

Abstract:
Abstract I introduce a new critical test statistic, c*, that uses Bayesian statistical decision theory to help an analyst determine whether quantitative evidence supports the existence of a substantively meaningful relationship. Bayesian statistical decision theory takes a rational choice perspective toward evidence, allowing researchers to ask whether it makes sense to believe in the existence of a statistical relationship given how they value the consequences of correct and incorrect decisions. If a relationship of size c* is not important enough to influence future research and policy advice, then the evidence does not support the existence of a substantively significant effect. A replication of findings from the American Journal of Political Science and Journal of Politics illustrates that statistical significance at conventional levels is neither necessary nor sufficient to accept a hypothesis of substantive significance using c*. I also make software packages available for Stata and R that allow political scientists to easily use c* for inference in their own research.

inference, t test, p value, Bayesian methods

Abstract:
Many prior experiments have shown that individuals will sacrifice their own well-being to benefit others in a variety of situations. This behavior can be easily explained if people possess a preference for fairness or an aversion to inequality. On a larger scale, such preferences might explain the existence of macroeconomic redistributive income tax programs. This paper presents an experiment designed to determine the degree to which such preferences might drive voting behavior regarding redistributive taxation. In the experiment, subjects earn money in a real effort production task and are allowed to vote on a tax rate that determines the scope of redistribution. The subjects also complete a questionnaire about their economic ideology, allowing a test of whether this ideology is linked to the willingness to vote for redistributive taxes. We find that a subject’s relative earnings primarily determines her voting behavior, with our subjects showing little in the way of preferences for fairness or inequality aversion.

redistribution, taxation, fairness

Abstract:
Private information characteristics like resolve and audience costs are powerful influences over strategic international behavior, especially crisis bargaining. As a consequence, states face asymmetric information when interacting with one another and will presumably try to learn about each others' private characteristics by observing each others' behavior. A satisfying statistical treatment would account for the existence of asymmetric information and model the learning process. This study develops a formal and statistical framework for incomplete information games that we term the Bayesian Quantal Response Equilibrium Model (BQRE model). Our BQRE model offers three advantages over existing work: it directly incorporates asymmetric information into the statistical model's structure, estimates the influence of private information characteristics on behavior, and mimics the temporal learning process that we believe takes place in international politics.