Francesco Fallucchi

University of Bergamo | UNIBG · Department of Management, Economics and Quantitative Methods

Experiments which elicit preferences for conditional cooperation in public goods games with linear payoffs find that about one-quarter of people approximately match the average contributions of others. To identify from among possible explanations proposed for this strong form of conditional cooperation, we extend the elicitation method of Fischbach...

Many important economic outcomes result from cumulative effects of smaller choices, so the best outcomes require accounting for other choices at each decision point. We document narrow bracketing -- the neglect of such accounting -- in work choices in a pre-registered experiment on MTurk: bracketing changes average willingness to work by 13-28%. In...

A popular empirical technique to measure norms uses coordination games to elicit what subjects in an experiment consider appropriate behavior in a given situation (Krupka and Weber, 2013). The Krupka-Weber method works under the assumption that subjects use their normative expectations to solve the coordination game. However, subjects might use alt...

In an online, pre-registered experiment, we explore the impact of AI mediated communication within the context of a Trust Game with unverifiable actions. We compare a baseline treatment, where no communication is allowed, to treatments where participants can use free-form communication or have the additional option of using ChatGPT-generated promis...

We study the Tullock contest model with loss aversion and endogenously formed reference points. In a contest with n possibly heterogeneous players and convex effort costs, we establish sufficient conditions for a unique Nash equilibrium in pure strategies. Subsequently, we analyze the impact of loss aversion on players' spending behavior, probabili...

Over the first half of March 2021, the majority of European governments suspended Astrazeneca’s Vaxzevria vaccine as a precaution following media reports of rare blood clots. We analyse the impact of the European Medicines Agency’s (EMA) March 18th statement assuring the public of the safety of Vaxzevria and the immediate reinstatement of the vacci...

We extend the study of behavioural types in voluntary contribution games, adapting the elicitation method of Fischbacher et al. (2001) to a broader range of economic and strategic incentives. Our results in the standard VCM game align with previous findings in many respects; in particular, we identify one-quarter of participants as a distinctive gr...

A popular empirical technique to measure norms uses coordination games to elicit what subjects in an experiment consider appropriate behavior in a given situation (Krupka and Weber in J Eur Econ Assoc 11(3):495–524, 2013). The Krupka–Weber method works under the assumption that subjects use their normative expectations to solve the coordination gam...

Over the first half of March 2021, the majority of European governments suspended Astrazeneca's Vaxzevria vaccine as a precaution following media reports of rare blood clots. We analyse the impact of the European Medicines Agency's (EMA) March 18th statement assuring the public of the safety of Vaxzevria and the immediate reinstatement of the vacci...

Over the first half of March 2021, the majority of European governments suspended AstraZeneca's Vaxzevria vaccine as a precaution following media reports of rare blood clots. We analyse the impact of the European Medicines Agency's (EMA) March 18th statement assuring the public of the safety of Vaxzevria and the immediate reinstatement of the vacci...

Testing is widely seen as one core element of a successful strategy to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic and many countries have increased their efforts to provide testing at large scale. As most democratic governments refrain from enacting mandatory testing, a key emerging challenge is to increase voluntary participation. Using behavioural economics i...

We apply the classifier-Lasso (Su et al. 2016) to detect the presence of latent types in two data sets of previous contest experiments, one that keeps the grouping of contestants fixed over the experiment and one that randomly regroups contestants after each round. Our results suggest that there exist three distinct types of players in both contest...

We design an experiment to study investment behavior in different repeated contest settings, varying the uncertainty of the outcomes and the number of participants in contests. We find decreasing over-expenditures and a higher rate of ‘dropout’ in contests with high uncertainty over outcomes (winner-take-all contests), while we detect a quick conve...

We investigate how individuals react to different types of asymmetries in experimental two-player Tullock contests where contestants expend resources to win a prize. We compare the effects of three different sources of asymmetry: resources, abilities and possible outcomes. We find that overall competitive effort is greatest in the presence of asymm...

Competition between groups is ubiquitous in social and economic life, and typically occurs between groups that are not created equal. Here we experimentally investigate the implications of this general observation on the unfolding of symmetric and asymmetric competition between groups that are either homogeneous or heterogeneous in the ability of t...

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed an enormous burden on health systems, and guidelines have been developed to help healthcare practitioners when resource shortage imposes the choice on who to treat. However, little is known on the public perception of these guidelines and the underlying moral principles. Here, we assess on a sample of 1033 American...

We validate experimentally a new survey item to measure the preference for competition. The item, which measures participants’ agreement with the statement “Competition brings the best out of me”, predicts individuals’ willingness to compete in the laboratory after controlling for their ability, beliefs, and risk attitude (Niederle and Vesterlund,...

The Covid-19 pandemic has placed an enormous burden on health systems and guidelines have been developed to help health care practitioners when resources shortage imposes the choice on who to treat. However, little is known on the public perception of these guidelines and the underlying moral principles. Here, we assess on a sample of N = 1033 Amer...

We validate experimentally a new survey item to measure the preference for competition. The item, which measures participants' agreement with the statement "Competition brings the best out of me", predicts individuals' willingness to compete in the laboratory after controlling for their ability, beliefs, and risk attitude (Niederle and Vesterlund,...

We experimentally investigate the role of moral concerns in three-player ultimatum bargaining. In our experimental paradigm, proposers can increase the overall size of the pie at the expenses of an NGO that conducts humanitarian aid in emergency areas. In a first study, we find that responders are not willing to engage in ‘immoral’ transactions onl...

We conduct a real-effort experiment to test the effects of an affirmative action policy that reserves a share of the prize to subjects of a disadvantaged category in rent-seeking contests. We test three potential pitfalls of the affirmative action policy: (i) whether the introduction of the policy distorts effort and selection in the contest, (ii)...

We propose a framework for identifying discrete behavioural types in experimental data. We re-analyse data from six previous studies of public goods voluntary contribution games. Using hierarchical clustering analysis, we construct a typology of behaviour based on a similarity measure between strategies. We identify four types with distinct stereot...

We experimentally investigate the role of moral concerns in three-player ultimatum bargaining. In our experimental paradigm, proposers can increase the overall size of the pie at the expenses of an NGO that conducts humanitarian aid in emergency areas. In a first study, we find that responders are not willing to engage in ‘immoral’ transactions onl...

In this paper, we systematically analyze and test how heterogeneity in abilities, both within and between groups, affects competition between groups.

We study the relative effectiveness of contracts that are framed either in terms of bonuses or penalties. In one set of treatments, subjects know at the time of effort provision whether they have achieved the bonus/avoided the penalty. In another set of treatments, subjects only learn the success of their performance at the end of the task. We fail...

We investigate the effects of information feedback in rent-seeking games with two different contest structures. In the share contest a contestant receives a share of the rent equal to her share of rent-seeking expenditures, while in the lottery contest a contestant wins the entire rent with probability equal to her share of rent-seeking expenditure...