Le Lec Fabrice

Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne | UNiVPARIS1 · Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne (CES)

In many collective action problems individuals' contributions increase the probability of a collectively favorable event rather than affect the quantity of public goods provided. Such problems, that we refer to as collective prevention games, remain largely unexplored in the literature. We fill this gap by setting up an experiment where subjects' c...

This paper investigates how people evaluate different sets of opportunities in terms of welfare and freedom of choice. To do this, we run a new survey-based study with 4,902 participants across 10 different countries, in which subjects face a series of theoretically-relevant binary comparisons of opportunity sets. Our analysis proceeds in two stage...

Using a laboratory experiment, we examine whether voluntary sanctions induce subjects to coordinate more efficiently in a repeated minimum-effort game. While most groups first experience Pareto inferior coordination in a baseline treatment, the level of effort increases substantially once ex post sanctioning opportunities are introduced, that is, w...

Whereas the literature on choice overload has shown that people tend to defer their choice or experience less satisfaction under choice proliferation, this paper aims to test how the profusion of choice directly affects individuals’ revealed preferences over options. To do so, we run an experiment where subjects have to compare familiar (i.e., easy...

This study reports on the impact of exposure to tax dilemmas on tax morale. We focus on young adults in their “impressionable years” and with little or no previous tax exposure in order to estimate the impact of actual (albeit experimental) exposure to tax dilemmas on their self-declared tax morale. First, we ascertain the participants’ (N = 385),...

The experimental measurement of social preferences has led to somewhat equivocal results. The experimental Equality Equivalence Test proposed by Kerschbamer (2015) is a promising, simple, model-free and comprehensive tool for eliciting distributional social preferences. We here assess the validity of this method by modifying it so that we can test...

Introduction Tobacco smoking is one of the leading causes of preventable death. This is not inevitable as tobacco control tools have become more powerful and more effective. Among these, warnings on cigarette packs have proven to be somewhat effective. Our objective is to increase the efficacy of antismoking warnings by using innovative psychologic...

Ce Précis propose un panorama des méthodes expérimentales utilisées en sciences économiques. Ces méthodes ont été développées afin d’observer les comportements adoptés par les « agents économiques » dans des situations qui répliquent celles auxquelles s’intéresse l’économiste ; mais dans un environnement contrôlé. Sur cette base, les outils présent...

In Kőszegi and Rabin’s (Q J Econ 1133–1165, 2006, Am Econ Rev 97:1047–1073, 2007) reference-dependent model of preferences, the chance of obtaining a better outcome can reduce an agent’s expected utility through an increase in the stochastic reference point. This means that individuals may prefer stochastically dominated lotteries. In this sense, h...

Cet article étudie pourquoi certains individus ont tendance à adopter des comportements de consommation conformistes. Plus précisément, notre attention se porte sur l’analyse des préférences intrinsèques pour la conformité : les préférences des individus auraient tendance à converger vers celles des autres, même dans des contextes où il n’existe pa...

When taking into account the chances of success, strategic mating motivations do imply a bias not toward the most attractive individuals, but toward average or mildly attractive individuals, undermining the explanation of Maestripieri et al. at a fundamental level. This leaves open the possibility of alternative explanations and calls for a full-fl...

Based on experimental dictator games with probabilistic prospects, Brock, Lange, and Ozbay (2013) conclude that neither ex post nor ex ante comparisons can fully account for observed behavior. We argue that their conclusion that ex ante comparisons cannot explain the data is at best weakly supported by their results, and do so on three grounds: (i...

Nous présentons la mise en place d'une expérience lors d'un évènement grand public national, de manière simultanée dans 11 villes françaises, en septembre 2015. L'expérience a impliqué plus de 2700 participants et a duré quatre heures ininterrompues. L'objectif de cet article est à la fois de fournir une feuille de route pour une éventuelle réplica...

We propose an experimental method whose purpose is to remove social concerns in games. The core idea is to adapt the binary-lottery incentive scheme, so that an individual payoff is a probability to see one's preferred social allocation implemented. For a large class of social preference models, the method induces payoffs in the game that are in li...

Economic crises bring to the fore deep issues for the economic profession and their models. Given that cognitive science shares with economics many theoretical frameworks and research tools designed to understand decision-making behavior, should economists be the only ones re-examining their conceptual ideas and empirical methods? We argue that eco...

We propose an experimental method whose purpose is to induce selfish behavior in games for a broad class of social preferences. It provides a theoretical framework for testing game theoretical predictions by confronting subjects with a commonly known payoff matrix actually representing their preferences. The paper describes the empirical tests of t...

This paper investigates how people value choice. The experiment consists of eliciting subjects' willingness to accept for various choice sets. This approach allows us to assess whether prior to making their decision, people appreciate a wider set of options or not. In contrast with the existing literature, our experimental protocol controsl for sev...

Many adults have an overly pessimistic view of old age because they fail to correctly predict their ability to hedonically adapt to old-age health related problems. A standard utility model where the marginal utility of health is higher at a lower level of health predicts that this overly pessimist view raises the incentive for healthy behavior. Bu...

This paper reports the results of a ‘probabilistic dictator game’ experiment in which subjects were given an option to share chances to win a prize with a dummy player. Using a within-subject design we manipulated two aspects of the decision, the relative cost of sharing and the nature of the lottery: the draws were either independent for the two p...

This paper reports the results of a 'probabilistic dictator game' experiment in which subjects had to allocate chances to win a prize between themselves and a dummy player. Using a within-subject design we manipu-lated two aspects of the decision: the relative values of the prizes–being equal for both players, higher for the dictator or higher for...

Comment on the article "Making Decision in Large Worlds" by Ken Binmore