Cristina Bicchieri | Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics,  University of Pennsylvania (see profile here)

Thursday 4th February 2021

The magnitude and nature of the COVID-19 pandemic prevents public health policies from relying on coercive enforcement. Practicing social distancing, wearing masks and staying at home are voluntary and conditional on the behavior of others. We present the results of a large-scale survey experiment in nine countries with representative samples of the population. We find that both empirical expectations (what others do) and normative expectations (what others approve of) play a significant role in compliance, beyond the effect of any other individual or group characteristic. In our survey experiment, when empirical and normative expectations of individuals are high, compliance goes up by 55% (relative to the low expectations condition). Similar results are obtained when we look at self-reported compliance among those with high expectations. Our results are driven by an asymmetric interaction with individuals’ trust in government and science. Holding both expectations high, the effect of trusting science is substantial and significant in our vignette experiment (22% increase in compliance), and even larger in self-reported compliance (76% and 127% increase before and after the lockdown). By contrast, trusting the government only generates modest effects. At the macro level, the country-level trust in science, and not in government, becomes a strong predictor of compliance.

Access the paper (co-authored with Enrique Fatas, Abraham Aldama, Andres Casas, Ishwari Deshpande, Mariagiulia Lauro, Cristina Parilli, Max Spohn, Paula Pereira and Ruiling Wen) here:https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-106840/v1

Chris Blattman | Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts, University of Chicago

Thursday 18th February 2021

Gangs govern millions worldwide. Why do they rule, and how do they react to states? Many argue that criminal rule provides protection when states do not, and thus increasing state services could crowd gangs out. To investigate, we began by interviewing leaders from 30 criminal groups in Medellín. They told us that this conventional view overlooks gangs’ indirect incentives to rule: governing keeps police out and fosters civilian loyalty, protecting other illegal businesses. We present a model of duopolistic competition with returns to loyalty and show under what conditions state expansion causes gangs to increase or decrease governing. We run the first gang-level field experiment, intensifying city governance in select neighborhoods for two years, and see no decrease in gang rule. We also examine a 30-year quasi-experiment. New borders in Medellín created local discontinuities in access to government services. Gangs responded to greater state rule by governing more. We propose alternatives for countering criminal governance.

Caroline Graf | PhD student, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Netherlands)

4th February 2021

Incentives have surprisingly inconsistent effects when it comes to encouraging people to behave prosocially. That is, the effects of incentives vary across incentive types, private versus public settings and across countries. Previous theoretical accounts have explained these phenomena by postulating an additive effect of intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, and reputational motivation. We build on these theories, but introduce a key theoretical modification: Reputational motivation depends on social norms. We empirically test our model on the real-world prosocial behavior of blood donation using a comparative dataset comprising representative samples from 28 European countries. We find that social norms can account for the varying effects of financial and time incentives on donation behavior across countries. That is, incentives were associated with higher levels of prosociality when social norms regarding the incentive were more positive. The results indicate that social norms regarding incentives play an important role in determining the effect of incentives on prosocial behavior.

Abraham Aldama | Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Pennsylvania (US)

18th February 2021

Since the 1960s, income inequality has increased in the US. However, taxation on the rich has decreased in the same period. The literature has provided several explanations for why this might be the case. We focus on people’s perception of the extent of inequality. Using a large scale online experiment, we find that providing information about inequality and incentives to overcome cognitive and ideiological biases changes people’s perceptions about the extent of inequality in the US. However, this does not translate into changes in the demand for redistribution through either public or private means. We further find that the lack of change in preferences is not driven by differential responses across across a number of subgroups.