Alexia Gaudeul

European Commission | ec · Joint Research Centre (JRC)

We investigate the decision of experimental subjects to incur the risk of revealing personal private information to other participants. We do so by using a novel method to generate personal information that reliably induces privacy concerns in the laboratory. We show that individual decisions to incur privacy risk are correlated with decisions to i...

The Attraction Effect has been studied in conditions of indifference among options and measured at the aggregate level. We introduce a new within-subjects design based on induced preferences and psychometrics. Our method yields two individual-level measures: the traditional, frequency measure and a new, monetary indicator. The monetary indicator me...

We run a market experiment where firms can choose not only their price but also whether to present comparable offers. They are faced with artificial demand from consumers who make mistakes when assessing the net value of products on the market. If some offers are comparable however, some consumers favor the best of the comparable offers vs. non-com...

This paper deals with the role of reciprocation in the formation of individuals’ social networks. We follow the activity of a panel of bloggers over more than a year and investigate the extent to which initiating a relation brings about its reciprocation. We adapt a standard capital investment model to study how reciprocation affects the build-up o...

Behavioural and industrial economists have argued that, because of cognitive limitations, consumers are liable to make sub-optimal choices in complex decision problems. Firms can exploit these limitations by introducing spurious complexity into tariff structures, weakening price competition. This paper models a countervailing force. Consumers’ choi...

We explore the nature and robustness of the attraction effect. The attraction effect can be seen as a persistent bias or as the result of heuristics that may not persist upon reflection. We provide robust experimental evidence that the attraction effect first rises and then falls over time when participants are incentivized to make a quick choice t...

- Websites must obtain consent when storing cookies on their users’ devices. - They do so by making it difficult to reject cookies. - This is not necessarily in the best interest of the user. - We propose three solutions to improve the way consent is requested.

We theoretically and experimentally study the evolution of strategies reflecting different moral judgments under indirect reciprocity. We fully characterize the asymptotically stable sets of rest points. In all cooperative rest points multiple strategies coexist. This offers an explanation for the heterogeneity in moral judgments among humans. The...

This editorial summarises a number of recent empirical contributions to macroeconomic policies in open economies, with a special focus on European and small emerging countries. The contributions are a selection of the articles presented at the 20th Annual Conference of the International Network For Economic Research (INFER), which took place at the...

Purpose Many online transactions and digital services depend on consumers’ willingness to take privacy risks, such as when shopping online, joining social networks, using online banking or interacting with e-health platforms. Their decisions depend on not only how much they would suffer if their data were revealed but also how uncomfortable they fe...

Defaults may not directly get people to behave as intended, such as saving more, eating healthy food or donating to charity. Rather, defaults often only put people on the ‘right’ path, such as joining a savings plan, buying healthy food or pledging money to charity. This an issue because getting more people to take those first steps does not necess...

This habilitation deals with the impact of the Internet in three main domains of economic activity: How the Internet facilitates consumer search in consumer markets, fosters the formation of social networks, and enables new forms of organization for collaborative projects.

Call for Papers for the 20th INFER Annual Conference (September 5 – 7, 2018) at the University of Göttingen. This is a medium-size generalist conference with a long tradition, good reputation and great speakers! Deadline for submissions: February 28, 2018. http://infer2018.uni-goettingen.de/call-for-paper/

Firms with very similar products often present their products in different ways. This makes it difficult for consumers to find out which product fits their needs best, or which one is the cheapest. Why is there no convergence toward common ways to present products? Is it possible for firms to maintain high prices by confusing consumers? We run a ma...

We study the impact of revealing personal information on the selection of partners when forming individual networks. In our experiment, a “contribution phase” is followed by a “network phase”: individuals first decide whether to contribute and then decide with whom to form a link. An exchange of contributions between individuals occurs only if a bi...

How do outside options affect cooperation? We examine the stability of cooperation and the reasons for exit in public projects with stochastic outcomes, imperfect monitoring and an exit option. We find that treatments with high barriers to exit generate higher welfare overall as they foster stability and prevent inefficient separation of pairs. The...

We summarize the career of Reinhard Selten, who received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994. We underline his contributions to several domains of the theory of games, to the study of bounded rationality and to the methodology of experimental economics. We finally present the papers in this special issue in honor of his 85th birthday.

We refine the understanding of individual preferences across social lotteries, whereby the payoffs of a pair of subjects are exposed to random shocks.We find that aggregate behavior is ex-post and ex-ante inequality averse, but also that there is a wide variety of individual preferences and that the majority of subjects are indifferent to social co...

We consider in this paper whether the gender mix at the level of decision-makers in firms can influence gender representation at the employee level. We run a laboratory experiment whereby we present a pair of independent employers with applications from two potential employees. We consider whether the gender of the other employer will influence an...

We report the results of an original experiment that was designed to test the strength and robustness of the attraction effect. Rather than the usual simple tests for this effect, we consider a conceptually simple consumer purchasing task where alternatives are however difficult to evaluate. For the attraction effect to be observed, the consumer mu...

Firms can exploit consumers' mistakes when facing complex purchasing decision problems but Gaudeul and Sugden (2012) argue that if at least some consumers disregard offers that are difficult to compare with others then firms will be forced into adopting common ways to present their offers and thus make choice easier. We design an original experimen...

This paper examines one of the most important marketing strategies by software producers on the Internet. That is whether to offer free samples and if so, whether to list the samples on shareware repositories. I show that firms with higher value products have a greater incentive to offer free samples but are more reluctant to do so if they are well...

Bloggers devote significant time not only producing content for others to read, watch or listen to, but also paying attention to and engaging in interactions with other bloggers. We hope to throw light not only on the factors that gain bloggers significant readership and lively interactions with their audience, but also on the rules that govern the...

Those lecture notes cover the basics of a course in microeconomic theory for MSc students in Economics. They were developed over five years of teaching MSc Economic Theory I in the School of Economics at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. The programme of this course is divided in three parts; choice under uncertainty, game theory and in...

I consider a Vickrey-Salop model of spatial product differentiation with quasi-linear utility functions and contrast two modes of production, the proprietary model where entrepreneurs sell software to the users, and the open source model where users participate in software development. I show that the OS model of production may be more efficient fr...

The rivalry between developers of open source and proprietary software encourages open source developers to court users and respond to their needs. If the open source developer wants to promote her own open source standard and solutions, she may choose liberal license terms such as those of the Berkeley Software Distribution as proprietary develope...

This paper examines one of the most important marketing strategies by software producers on the Internet. That is whether to offer free samples and, if so, whether to list the samples on shareware repositories. I show that firms with higher value products have a greater incentive to offer free samples but are more reluctant to do so if they are wel...

This paper traces the history of TeX, the open source typesetting program. TeX was an early and very successful open source project that imposed its standards in a particularly competitive environment and inspired many advances in the typesetting industry. Developed over three decades, TeX came into competition with a variety of open source and pro...