Behavioral economicsAn experimental approach.

Resumen

The tools chosen as the engine of the research, and the common thread of this thesis, will be experiments, economic experiments, where we infer agents behavior after observing their actions against different contexts, specifically we will update the traditional economic experiments in behavioral economics literature to adapt them to a more future-focused working methodology, In chapter 2 and 3 we will adapt the experiments to be conducted in an interconnected and experiential environment. In chapter 4, we will focus the experience on a teaching dynamic lessons plan where students will learn by playing with some of the main concepts of behavioral economics, breaking the classroom barrier and leaving the laboratories to a more relaxed environment. More specifically, a summary of these chapters would be: Does volunteering increase employment opportunities? We study the benefits of doing volunteer work when seeking employment opportunities. We do so by sending 2000 fictitious curricula to a large online platform of job offers in the United States. Half of these curricula are randomly assigned volunteer activities. We find that people who do volunteer work receive 45 percent more callbacks for interviews. The volunteering premium is not uniform across economic sectors. In retailing and real estate, it is significant, whereas in the other sectors we have studied (animal service, technology, and automobile) it is not. Does the die-under-the-cup device exaggerate cheating? Using a powered online experiment (774 subjects, 54\% female, av. age = 24.27) under the die-under-the-cup paradigm, this paper shows that a minimal variation (reversing payoffs) increases participants’ honesty. Dice numbers and monetary prizes are aligned in the control treatment (1->5€, 2->10€, …, 6->30€), while numbers and monetary prizes go in opposite directions in the reversed treatment (1->30€, 2->25€, …, 6->5€). Although this small variation has no theoretical consequences, it results in more honest behavior. Since the participants in the control and the treatment are identical, we conclude that the observed dishonesty is caused by the task, that is, it is an artifact. The effect is stronger for women and older participants. Taking risks by flying paper airplanes. We propose an outdoor activity to be conducted in game theory courses where students are invited to throw airplanes at a distance of their choice in order to reach a certain target. The prize (class points) will increase as the distance students throw the airplane increases and it will be conditional on hitting the target. Subjects repeat the task three times and the best of the three determines their payoffs. The main purpose of these outdoor classroom experiments is to motivate students to learn by experiencing concepts of uncertainty in the gain domain (risk aversion). After the experiment, students are predisposed to think about decisions under uncertainty. Specifically, we provide a theoretical model to explain participants' decisions, optimal behavior, and deviations from such behavior.