Ennio Bilancini

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

In this paper we apply the instrumental approach to social preferences in order to distinguish among various shapes of preferences for social status. In particular, we consider the shape of reduced preferences that emerge in the equilibrium of a two-sided matching model with non-transferable utility. 14 and 15 show that, under full observability of...

We present a model of two-sided matching where utility is non-transferable and information about individualsʼ skills is private, utilities are strictly increasing in the partnerʼs skill and satisfy increasing differences. Skills can be either revealed or kept hidden, but while agents on one side have verifiable skills, agents on the other side have...

Impulsive reactions in social interactions may result in poor or even detrimental outcomes. Particular cognitive states, such as mental fatigue induced by extended practice with cognitively demanding activities, especially if combined with sleep restriction or deprivation, seem to impair the individuals’ ability to exert self-control effectively an...

Inspired by the growing interest in linking several behaviors with specific genetic assets, research on the topic spiked in recent years, showing that several genetic variants of dopaminergic and serotonergic pathways are related to both emotional and cognitive components of social decision-making. In this paper, we explored the relationship betwee...

This paper presents an analysis of two pre-registered experimental studies examining the impact of `Motivational Interviewing' and `Directing Style' on discussions about Sustainable Development Goals. To evaluate the effectiveness of these communication styles in enhancing awareness and motivating action toward the Sustainable Development Goals, we...

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to both exacerbate and ameliorate existing socioeconomic inequalities. In this article, we provide a state-of-the-art interdisciplinary overview of the potential impacts of generative AI on (mis)information and three information-intensive domains: work, education, and healthcare. Our goal is...

Biases in favor of culturally prevalent social ingroups are ubiquitous, but random assignment to arbitrary experimentally created social groups is also sufficient to create ingroup biases (i.e., the minimal group effect; MGE). The extent to which ingroup bias arises from specific social contexts versus more general psychological tendencies remains...

Background Despite being a major advancement in modern medicine, vaccines face widespread hesitancy and refusal, posing challenges to immunization campaigns. The COVID-19 pandemic accentuated vaccine hesitancy, emphasizing the pivotal role of beliefs in efficacy and safety on vaccine acceptance rates. This study explores the influence of efficacy a...

In the context of a one-shot public goods game with a large group size and a low marginal per capita return, we study if and how cooperation is affected by the presence of environmental risk – defined as an exogenous stochastic process that generates a severe adverse event with a very small probability – and by the correlation of such risk among th...

Generative artificial intelligence, including chatbots like ChatGPT, has the potential to both exacerbate and ameliorate existing socioeconomic inequalities. In this article, we provide a state-of-the-art interdisciplinary overview of the probable impacts of generative AI on four critical domains: work, education, health, and information. Our goal...

Generative artificial intelligence, including chatbots like ChatGPT, has the potential to both exacerbate and ameliorate existing socioeconomic inequalities. In this article, we provide a state-of-the-art interdisciplinary overview of the probable impacts of generative AI on four critical domains: work, education, health, and information. Our goal...

We study the impact of the mode of cognition on risk taking. In an online experiment, we ask participants to make a simple decision involving risk by performing the bomb risk elicitation task. The control group undergoes no manipulation, while in the treatment group, we exogenously manipulate the mode of cognition by requiring subjects to write dow...

Protein biosynthesis is a complex process that involves the transcription of DNA into mRNA and the subsequent translation of mRNA into proteins according to the genetic code. To introduce this fundamental process to a broad audience, we developed "The Language of Life", a game-based workshop that was presented at the Genoa Science Festival 2022, th...

We study how cooperation in one-shot Public Goods Games with large group sizes is affected by the presence of a slight chance of severe adverse events. We find that cooperation is substantial, notwithstanding a low marginal return of contributions. The cooperation level is comparable to what is found in similar settings for small-sized groups. Furt...

We study the evolution of behavior under reinforcement learning in a Prisoner's Dilemma where agents interact in a regular network and can learn about whether they play one-shot or repeatedly by incurring a cost of deliberation. With respect to other behavioral rules used in the literature, (i) we confirm the existence of a threshold value of the p...

Background Vaccines are one of the most significant achievements of modern medicine. However, vaccine hesitancy and refusal are widespread and can hamper immunization campaigns. During the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine hesitancy became particularly evident. Beliefs regarding vaccine efficacy and safety are prominent in shaping vaccine acceptance rates...

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public...

In pairwise interactions, where two individuals meet and play a social game with each other, assortativity in cognition means that pairs where both decision-makers use the same cognitive process are more likely to occur than what happens under random matching. In this paper, we show theoretically that assortativity in cognition may arise as a conse...

In this paper we investigate the effect of moral suasion on ingroup favouritism. We report a well-powered, pre-registered, two-stage 2x2 mixed-design experiment. In the first stage, groups are formed on the basis of how participants answer a set of questions, concerning non-morally relevant issues in one treatment (assorting on non-moral preference...

The impact of COVID-19 represents a specific challenge for voluntary transfusional systems sustained by the intrinsic motivations of blood donors. In general, health emergencies can stimulate altruistic behaviors. However, in this context, the same prosocial motivations, besides the personal health risks, could foster the adherence to social distan...

Escape from the Castle is a digital escape game created with the collaboration of the Museum of Saving in Turin (Italy), Neuroscience Lab Intesa Sanpaolo Innovation Center, and the GAME Science Research Center of IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca. In the escape game, players must help Mica, the mascot of the Museum, to run away from the Ghost o...

In pairwise interactions assortativity in cognition means that pairs where both decision-makers use the same cognitive process are more likely to occur than what happens under random matching. In this paper, we study both the mechanisms determining assortativity in cognition and its effects. In particular, we analyze an applied model where assortat...

We study the long-run dynamics of a repeated non-symmetric hawk–dove type interaction between agents of two different populations. Agents choose a strategy based on their previous experience with the other population by sampling from a collective memory of past interactions. We assume that the sample size differs between populations and define a me...

We report two studies on the role of altruism and reciprocity in the online one-shot Public Goods Game (PGG). In study 1 we run an experiment to see whether the disposition to donate (altruistic/prosocial disposition according to the Social Value Orientation scale (SVO), Murphy et al., 2011) and the disposition to reciprocate (disposition to be a c...

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied ma...

The study of moral judgements often centres on moral dilemmas in which options consistent with deontological perspectives (that is, emphasizing rules, individual rights and duties) are in conflict with options consistent with utilitarian judgements (that is, following the greater good based on consequences). Greene et al. (2009) showed that psychol...

In pairwise interactions assortativity in cognition means that pairs where both decision-makers use the same cognitive process are more likely to occur than what happens under random matching. In this paper we study both the mechanisms determining assortativity in cognition and its effects. In particular, we analyze an applied model where assortati...

The impact of COVID-19 represents a specific challenge for voluntary transfusional systems sustained by the intrinsic motivations of blood donors. In general, health emergencies can stimulate altruistic behaviors. However, in this context, the same prosocial motivations, besides the personal health risks, could foster the adherence to social distan...

This paper investigates the role of strategy assortativity for the evolution of parochialism. Individuals belonging to different groups are matched in pairs to play a prisoner's dilemma, conditioning their choice on the identity of the partner. Strategy assortativity implies that a player is more likely to be matched with someone playing the same s...

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behavior change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public h...

We study the long run convention emerging from stag hunt interactions when agents occasionally revise their action over time adopting a perturbed myopic best response rule, with the novelty of introducing social competition in the form of assignment of prizes to agents depending on the payoff ranking resulting from the stag hunt interaction. We fin...

Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and str...

This paper introduces and studies a class of evolutionary dynamics—pairwise interact-and-imitate dynamics (PIID)—in which agents are matched in pairs, engage in a symmetric game, and imitate the opponent with a probability that depends on the difference in their payoffs. We provide a condition on the underlying game, named supremacy, and show that...

In this study we estimate the impact of a game-based educational program aimed at promoting sustainable water usage among 2nd-4th grade students and their families living in the municipality of Lucca, Italy. To this purpose we exploited unique data from a quasi-experiment involving about two thousand students, one thousand participating (the treatm...

This paper introduces and studies a class of evolutionary dynamics --- Pairwise Interact-and-Imitate Dynamics (PIID) --- in which agents are matched in pairs, engage in a symmetric game, and imitate the opponent with a probability that depends on the difference in their payoffs. We provide a condition on the underlying game, named supremacy, and sh...

Social norms interventions are increasingly used in applied policy-making such as to end female genital mutilation or open defecation. Amongst the reasons for why policy-makers rely on social norms intervention tools is that the relevant underlying theory, which is concerned with dynamic-stochastic deviations processes, has matured substantially ov...

In this paper, we develop a variant of the persuasion game by Milgrom and Roberts to study the emergence and the desirability of product labeling when buyers can acquire information on the quality of the product by paying a cost. Labeling is modeled as the (verifiable) public disclosure of an otherwise unobservable trait of the seller that is corre...

We study the impact of the mode of cognition on risk taking. In an online experiment we ask participants to make a simple decision involving risk. In the control group no manipulation is made, while in the treatment group we exogenously manipulate the mode of cognition by requiring subjects to write down a text that motivates their risky choice bef...

This paper considers the marriage problem under dynamic rematching. It is shown that if players who obtain higher payoffs are less likely to experiment with non-best response behavior, then matchings selected in the long run will belong to the set of Rawlsian stable matchings – the set of stable matchings which maximize the payoff of the worst off...

In this paper we study the role of inequality in a model of repeated social competition where endowments (the resources used in the competition) and rewards (the resources obtained as prizes) are connected because the rewards of today’s competition determine the endowments of tomorrow’s competition. We find that the harshness of social competition...

The new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) threatens the lives of millions of people around the world, making it the largest health threat in recent times. Billions of people around the world are asked to adhere to strict shelter-in-place rules, finalised to slow down the spread of the virus. Appeals and messages are being used by leaders and policy-ma...

We study the long-run conventions emerging in a stag-hunt game when agents are myopic best responders. Our main novel assumption is that errors converge to zero at a rate that is positively related to the payoff earned in the past. To fully explore the implications of this error model, we introduce a further novelty in the way we model the interact...

In this paper we investigate the effect of moral suasion on ingroup favouritism. We report a well-powered, pre-registered, two-stage 2x2 mixed-design experiment. In the first stage, groups are formed on the basis of how participants answer to a set of questions, concerning non-morally relevant issues in one treatment (assorting on non-moral prefere...

We present an incentivized laboratory experiment where a random sample of individuals playing a series of stag hunt games are forced to make their choices under time constraints, while the rest of the players have no time limits to decide. We find that individuals under the time pressure treatment are more likely to play stag (vs. hare) than indivi...

In this paper we investigate the evolution of cooperation when the interaction structure is strictly local, and hence fitness only depends on local behaviors, while the competition structure is partly global, and hence selection can happen also between distant agents. We explore this novel setup by means of numerical simulations in a model where ag...

The authors investigate the desirability of income taxes when the objective is to mitigate wasteful conspicuous consumption generated by people's status-seeking behavior. They consider the joint role of pre-tax wage inequality and of social norms determining how social status is assigned. They find that when social status is ordinal (i.e., only one...

Strategic interactions have been studied extensively in the area of judgment and decision-making. However, so far no specific measure of a decision-maker's ability to be successful in strategic interactions has been proposed and tested. Our contribution is the development of a measure of strategic ability that borrows from both game theory and psyc...

SQ Test — Original Italian version.

SQ Test — Translated English version.

We show that separation in signaling games can be obtained without the single crossing condition, in a model where the receiver reasons analogically across a pair of states and can acquire costly information on the sender's type. Beyond ordinary separation (high type sends high signal, low type sends low signal) we find that also reverse separation...

In this paper we study the typical dilemma of social coordination between a risk-dominant convention and a payoff-dominant convention. In particular, we consider a model where a population of agents play a coordination game over time, choosing both the action and the network of agents with whom to interact. The main modeling novelties with respect...

In this paper we develop a parsimonious model of decision-making that aims at capturing the determinants of consumers’ attitude change in response to persuasive messages that exploit reference cues. Our model is inspired by dual-process theories omation elaboration, but does not introduce purely behavioral traits. The decision-maker receives a mess...

This paper investigates the emergence of cooperation in a heterogeneous population that is divided into two cultural groups. Agents are randomly matched in pairs to engage in a prisoner dilemma. The matching process is assortative in actions, that is, cooperators are more likely to be matched with cooperators, defectors are more likely to be matche...

In this paper we investigate the consequences of introducing a cost to observe the signal in an otherwise standard signaling game. Beyond identifying equilibria, which we contrast with those of a standard signaling game, we study their robustness to two important classes of refinements: acting through restrictions on out-of-equilibrium beliefs and...

In this paper, we study games where the space of players (or types, if the game is one of incomplete information) is atomless and payoff functions satisfy the property of strict single crossing in players (types) and actions. Under an additional assumption of quasisupermodularity in actions of payoff functions and mild assumptions on the player (ty...

During the last thirty years US citizens experienced, on average, a decline in reported happiness, social connections, and confidence in institutions. We show that a remarkable portion of the decrease in happiness is predicted by the decline in social connections and confidence in institutions. We carry out our investigation in three steps. First,...

In this paper we investigate how preferences for relative consumption a!ec t the de- sirability of a pay-as-you-go system when both labor productivity and returns on financial markets are stochastic and possibly correlated. More precisely, we compare the desirability of a pay-as-you-go scheme - as opposed to a fully funded one - in two di!eren t si...

Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate the variation of subjective well-being experienced by Germans over the last two decades testing the role of some of the major correlates of people’s well-being. Our results suggest that the variation of Germans’ well-being between 1996 and 2007 is well predicted by changes ov...

Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate the variation of subjective well-being experienced by Germans over the last two decades testing the role of some of the major correlates of people’s well-being. Our results suggest that the variation of Germans’ well-being between 1996 and 2007 is well predicted by changes ov...

In this paper we apply a model of early industrialization to the case of New Zealand and Uruguay in 1870–1940. We show how differences in agricultural institutions may have produced different development paths in two countries which were similar under many respects. While in New Zealand the active role of the Crown in regulating the land market fac...

We prove that defining consumers’ preferences over budget sets is both necessary and sufficient to make every fully informative and finite set of observed consumption choices rationalizable by a collection of preferences which are transitive, complete, and monotone with respect to own consumption. Our finding has two important theoretical consequen...

We investigate the relationship between social participation and the hours worked in the market. Social participation is the component of social capital that measures individuals’ engament in groups, associations and non-governmental organizations. We provide a model of consumer choice where social participation may be either a substitute or a comp...

In this paper we contribute to the debate on the relationship between growth and well-being by studying an endogenous growth model where we allow for externalities in consumption, leisure, and production. We analyze three regimes: a decentralized economy where each household makes isolated choices without considering their external effects, a plann...

If preferences are rational and continuous, then strict convexity implies that the demand correspondence is single-valued (e.g. Barten and Böhm, 1982, lemma 7.3). We show that if, in addition, preferences are strictly monotone then the converse is also true, namely single-valuedness of the demand correspondence implies strict convexity of preferenc...

We provide a necessary and sufficient condition for goods to be normal when utility functions are differentiable and strongly quasi-concave. Our condition is equivalent to the condition proposed by Alarie et al. (1990), but it is easier to check: it only requires to compute the minors associated with the border column (or row) of the bordered Hessi...

In the last decade, a lively interdisciplinary discussion has grown around the evidence that, in the long-run, people’s subjective well-being is not significantly correlated with income growth. In other words, GDP growth does not predict the long run growth of subjective well-being. In this paper, we argue that there exists a different predictor of...

In this paper we study games where the space of player types is atomless, action spaces are second countable, and payoffs functions satisfy the property of strict single crossing in types and actions. Our main finding is that in this class of games every Nash equilibrium is essentially strict. We briefly develop and discuss the relevant consequence...

The Prisoner's Dilemma is a typical structure of interaction in human societies. In spite of a long tradition dealing with the matter from different perspectives, the emergence of cooperation or defection still remains a controversial issue from both an empirical and a theoretical point of view. In this paper we propose a local interaction model wi...

We provide macro evidence that in the long run the trends of social capital are a strong predictor of the trends of subjective well-being. Our measure of social capital is the individual membership in groups or associations. We apply the bivariate methodology used in Easterlin and Angelescu (2009) to investigate the long run relationship between su...

We investigate the effects of introducing a linear labor income tax under the assumptions that individuals have concerns for social status, that they can signal their relative standing by spending on a conspicuous good, and that the tax revenue is redistributed by means of lump sum transfers. We show that the way social status is defined – i.e. how...

This note extends the analysis of imprimitive indecomosable economies (e.g.~Nikaido, 1968, 1970) to the case of economies represented by a decomposable matrix. Using graph theory we show that imprimitivity leads to cyclical production lags also in decomposable economies, although in such a case the property must not be referred to the matrix repres...

Most popular explanations cannot fully account for the declining trend of U.S. reported well-being during the last thirty years. We test the hypothesis that the relationship between social capital and happiness at the individual level accounts for what is left unexplained by previous research. We provide three main findings. First, several indicato...

Concern for relative consumption introduces an additional source of risk for future pensioners. We study its implications, in terms of optimal risk diversification, for the choice of the mix between a pay-as-you-go and a funded pension systems. We identify a necessary and sufficient condition for the optimal share of pay-as-you-go to be larger when...

We demonstrate that in models where agents have concerns for status the model predictions can drastically change depending on whether status is modelled as an ordinal or cardinal magnitude. As a proof, we show that two well known theoretical findings are not robust to the substitution of ordinal status with cardinal status [Frank, R.H., The Demand...

In this paper we analyse how the distribution of land property rights affects industrial takeoff and aggregate income through its impact on effective demand. We apply a modified version of the model provided in Murphy et al. (1989, QJE) which allows us to analyse the role of land distribution when it is independent of the distribution of firm owner...