第155期岳麓经贸学术论坛

主题：Nudging People to Save Social Resources by Providing Salient Cost Information: A Field Experiment

主讲：闫巨博 助理教授

新加坡南洋理工大学经济系助理教授，美国康奈尔大学经济学博士。闫巨博博士的主要研究领域包括：行为和实验经济学、环境和能源经济学、应用微观经济学。

论文发表在Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, Natural Hazards, Agricultural Economics, Environmental and Resource Economics等国际顶尖学术刊物上。

时间：2018年12月26日（周三）上午10:00-11:30 AM

地点：湖南大学财院校区经贸学院401

讲座摘要

Social preference has been widely observed and is taken as the foundation of many policies targeting at voluntary behaviors such as donation. We report a field experiment in which we promote prosocial behavior by making the information about the cost of social resources more salient to the agents. The experiment is conducted at a major research university with all faculty and administrative staffs from two schools as participants. The university features an online system through which all employees order stationeries and other office supplies. The ordered items are used for work-related purposes, so they do not incur any cost to the employees but rather the cost is borne by the university. We randomize half of our subjects into a treatment group in which they were provided with the cost information of each item when ordering, while subjects in the control group do not receive such information. The experimental results show that displaying the costs reduces the quantities of ordered items. The effect is both statistically (p = 0.011) and economically significant (5.38% reduction). Moreover, we find that this effect only pertains to the extensive margin (i.e. quantity of varieties) but not the intensive margin (i.e. quantity for a given item). We also find that the treatment generates some efficiency gains for the university in terms of the reduction of cost of the orders. By examining the heterogeneity in terms of the treatment effect, we conjecture the effect is due to attention drawn by the treatment rather than reputation concern or social preference.

发表记录：

1. "Hitting the Replay Button: Musical Influences on Cooperative Behavior Decay on Extended Use." with Kevin Kniffin, William Schulze, and Brian Wansink. Journal of Organizational Behavior, forthcoming.

2. "The effects of trust in government on earthquake survivors’ risk perception and preparedness in China." with Ziqiang Han, Xiaoli Lu, and Elisa I. Hörhager, Natural Hazards, 2017, 86(1): 437-452.

3. "Nudging charitable giving: Three field experiments". with Kent Messer, Homa Zarghamee, Jacob Fooks, William Schulze, and Shang Wu. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2016, 66(SI): 137-149.

4. "Incentive mechanisms, loan decisions and policy rationing: a framed field experiment on rural credit", with Ying Cao, Calum G. Turvey, Jiujie Ma, Rong Kong, and Guangwen He. Agricultural Finance Review, 2016, 76(3): 326-347.

5. "University Licensing of Patents for Varietal Innovations in Agriculture". with Bradley Rickard, and Timothy Richards. Agricultural Economics, 47(1): 3-14.

6. "Does a detailed model of the electricity grid matter? Estimating the impacts of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative". with Daniel Shawhan, John Taber, Di Shi, Ray Zimmerman, Charles Marquet, Yingying Qi, Biao Mao, Richard Schuler, William Schulze, and Daniel Tylavsky. Resource and Energy Economics 36(1):191-207.

7. “The Engineering, Economic and Environmental Electricity Simulation Tool (E4ST): Description and an Illustration of its Capability and Use as a Planning/Policy Analysis Tool” with Biao Mao, Daniel Shawhan, Ray Zimmerman, Yujia Zhu, William Schulze, Richard Schuler, Daniel Tylavsky. 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS) 2317-2325. Best Paper Award

8. "A Detailed Power System Planning Model: Estimating the Long-Run Impact of Carbon-Reducing Policies". with Daniel Shawhan, John Taber, Ray Zimmerman, Charles Marquet, William Schulze, Richard Schuler, Robert Thomas, Daniel Tylavsky, Di Shi, Nan Li, Ward Jewell, Trevor Hardy, Zhouxing Hu. System Science (HICSS), 2015 48th Hawaii International Conference on 2497-2506.

9. "Context Effects in a Negatively Framed Social Dilemma Experiment". with Kent Messer, and Jordan Suter. Environmental and Resource Economics, 55(3):387-405.