María Paz Espinosa

• Ph D Harvard University
• Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea at University of the Basque Country

This dataset originates from TeensLab, a consortium of Spanish Universities dedicated to behavioral research involving Spanish teenagers. The dataset contains data from 33 distinct educational institutions across Spain, accounting for a total of 5,890 students aged 10 to 23 (M = 14.10, SD = 1.94), representing various educational levels such as pri...

This paper presents a procedure to assess the impact of a potential liberalisation process of electricity generation before its implementation. We simulate the functioning of a hypothetical day-ahead market in a country where it does not yet exist. Generators’ counterfactual bidding behavior is obtained by matching generating units to others in cou...

Renewable energy projects are subject to risk due to the uncertainty of future electricity prices and the amount of energy produced. Public support usually consists of some form of guarantee, either on the price received per MWh supplied or the return on investment per MW installed. This support reduces the investor’s risk, which is then assumed by...

Social policy-making aims at integrating vulnerable minorities, yet leading scientific theories conflict on how easily diverse groups cooperate. We experimentally investigate cooperation in 14 centers of a mentoring program where participants have two possible natural identities—individuals raised under legal guardianship, suffering a negative ster...

Experimental literature has found that risk attitudes are not robust to different elicitation techniques. However, most comparisons across elicitation methods involve different rewards and framings simultaneously. Our experimental design helps to disentangle the effect of these two factors. We consider two different personal rewards (money domain a...

We experimentally study a game in which success requires a sufficient total contribution by members of a group. There are significant uncertainties surrounding the chance and the total effort required for success. A theoretical model with max-min preferences towards ambiguity predicts higher contributions under ambiguity than under risk. However, i...

The uncertainties on property rights and other global governance issues related to space debris are market failures that call for public intervention. Inspired by other cases of negative externalities of production, this chapter models firm behaviour under different market structures for satellites and studies the effect of a policy intervention th...

We study whether democratic values that govern the preferences over social choice rules are subject to intergenerational transmission. We focus on five social choice rules, namely, Plurality, Plurality with Runoff, the Majoritarian Compromise, Borda Rule and Social Compromise, that represent very diverse values about how to extract public will out...

Implicit gender bias may affect hiring and promotion decisions, implying inefficiencies in the outcome of selection processes. We focus on the dynamics of gender bias when selecting candidates for a committee or position, and obtain the long-run female share as well as the conditions for a glass ceiling effect in a hierarchical structure. Candidate...

Experimental literature has accumulated evidence on the association of social identity to a higher or lower level of prosocial behavior. There is also evidence that donations are affected by the mere provision of information about the recipients, whatever its nature or content. In this paper, we present a unified experimental framework (within-subj...

This paper analyzes gender differences in student performance in Multiple-Choice Tests (MCT). We report evidence from a field experiment suggesting that, when MCT use a correction for guessing formula to obtain test scores, on average women tend to omit more items, get less correct answers and lower grades than men. We find that the gender differen...

We study ethno-linguistic diversity in a lab-in-the-field experiment in two bilingual societies, with (Bilbao, in the North of Spain) and without group conflict (Valencia, in the East). Participants from two ethno-linguistic cultures interact with other participants in Homogeneous (no diversity) or Mixed (ethno-linguistic diversity) environments. P...

This paper evaluates the net effect of renewable energy policy in Spain from 2002 to 2017 and calculates its cost-effectiveness in terms of CO2 emission reductions in the production of electricity. Our conclusions indicate that although the phasing out of Feed-in Tariffs reduced the regulatory costs, it also limited renewable participation in the e...

We explore the effect of bias on glass ceiling effects in hierarchical organizations and show that the latter do not necessarily come from greater discrimination at the top levels of the hierarchy but from the dynamics of the selection process, the shape of the hierarchical organization and the distribution of abilities. These results are consisten...

Incentives for renewable energy based on Feed-in-Tariffs have succeeded in achieving high levels of renewable installed capacity. However, these incentives have not been responsive to market conditions or price signals, imposing in some cases a great financial burden on consumers when Renewable Energy Sources reached significant levels. A way out o...

Recent energy policy has favored a massive introduction of Renewable Energy Sources on electricity markets, which has greatly impacted their performance. First, the electricity price has decreased as a consequence of the so-called merit-order effect. Another relevant effect is associated to the intermittent nature of Renewable Energy, which has inc...

A panel data set is one that follows a given sample of units over time. Thus, panel data analysis refers to econometric tools that deal with the estimation of relationships that combine time series and cross-sectional data. Appropriate estimation methods are discussed depending on the characteristics of the data.

We discuss dynamic models designed to describe the evolution of gender gaps deriving from the nature of the social decision processes. In particular, we study the committee choice function that maps a present committee composition to its future composition. The properties of this function and the decision mechanisms will determine the characteristi...

In this chapter we focus on strategic situations, which fall under the umbrella of coordination games. Both in daily life and in the world of economics there are numerous situations in which we are required to coordinate with friends, professors, colleagues, other firms, etc. Coordination may sometimes appear to be an easy task, but yet in some cas...

This study revisits different experimental data sets that explore social behavior in economic games and uncovers that many treatment effects may be gender-specific. In general, men and women do not differ in "neutral" baselines. However, we find that social framing tends to reinforce prosocial behavior in women but not men, whereas encouraging refl...

Feed-in tariffs have been the key support system for electricity from renewable sources in Spain and other European countries. However, given the growing criticism of this incentive scheme mainly due to its financial burden, the Spanish government has recently cancelled subsidies for any new electricity from renewable sources (RD-l 1/2012, 2012). S...

Feed-in tariffs have been the key support system for electricity from renewable sources in Spain and other European countries. However, given the growing criticism of this incentive scheme mainly due to its financial burden, the Spanish government has recently cancelled subsidies for any new electricity from renewable sources (RD-l 1/2012 2012). Si...

The main purpose of this paper is to study the effect of consumer expertise on mortgage loan prices. We argue that consumer expertise should affect price due to two reasons:(1) loan mortgage prices in non-price-regulated settings are usually the result of a bank-customer negotiation process; and (2) a mortgage loan is a complex product. Data on...

Renewable energy promotion and its cost are at the heart of the energy policy debate in many countries. The question from an economic perspective is how expensive the promotion of renewable sources through price-based incentive schemes is. This paper addresses this issue empirically. We analyze the Spanish electricity market during the period 2008–...

The European Commission Report on Competition in Professional Services found that recommended prices by professional bodies have a significant negative effect on competition since they may facilitate the coordination of prices between service providers and/or mislead consumers about reasonable price levels. Professional associations argue, first, t...

In July 2013, the government approved a major overhaul of the Spanish electricity sector to correct existing imbalances that have led to an exponential increase of regulated electricity costs and a huge tariff deficit. The reform addresses the problem of financial sustainability of the sector, severely affected by weak demand and overcapacity. Prev...

A disadvantage of multiple-choice tests is that students have incentives to guess. To discourage guessing, it is common to use scoring rules that either penalize wrong answers or reward omissions. These scoring rules are considered equivalent in psychometrics, although experimental evidence has not always been consistent with this claim. We model s...

Research on moral cleansing and moral self-licensing has introduced dynamic considerations in the theory of moral behavior. Past bad actions trigger negative feelings that make people more likely to engage in future moral behavior to offset them. Symmetrically, past good deeds favor a positive self-perception that creates licensing effects, leading...

Regulators and market participants have become increasingly concerned about the Spanish electricity tariff deficit, due to its size and the difficulties to control its growth. The deficit can be traced to inefficiencies in the market organization and solutions should be designed to mitigate those inefficiencies. Tariff deficits have allowed for the...

In this paper we measure the impact of regulatory measures which affected the Spanish electricity wholesale market in the period 2002-2005. Our approach is based on the fact that regulation changes firms' incentives and therefore their market behavior. In the absence of any regulation firms would choose profit- maximizing prices on their residual d...

El cumplimiento de los objetivos del Plan de Energías Renovables (PER) 2011-2020 en cuanto al volumen de producción de electricidad de fuentes renovables tendría un impacto sobre el precio de la energía en el mercado al por mayor, así como en el volumen de primas y, por tanto, en el déficit tarifario. En este artículo cuantificamos dichos efectos s...

This paper deals with pain anticipation experienced before medical procedures. our experimental results show that individuals with lower time discount factors are more prone to suffer pain in advance. We provide a framework to rationalize the connection between pain anticipation and impatience. in this set up, more impatient subjects, who only valu...

The scope of the paper is to review the literature that employs coordination games to study social norms and conventions from the viewpoint of game theory and cognitive psychology. We claim that those two alternative approaches are in fact complementary, as they provide different insights to explain how people converge to a unique system of self-fu...

This paper focuses on the friendship effect on donations in a dictator game. Our results indicate that the taste for altruism is substantially increased when friends play the role of recipients. Controlling for reciprocity there is still a significant friendship effect on donations.

We provide empirical evidence to support the claims that social diversity promotes prosocial behavior. We elicit a real-life social network and its members’ adherence to a social norm, namely inequity aversion. The data reveal a positive relationship between subjects’ prosociality and several measures of centrality. This result is in line with the...

Electricity from Renewable Sources, or RES-E, is supported in many forums because of the resulting reduction on the daily market price, due to the merit-order effect. Nevertheless, one of the main arguments against this kind of generation is the excessive costs imposed on the public support scheme. Therefore, the question raised in this paper is wh...

This paper provides experimental evidence on how players predict end-game effects in a linear public good game. Our regression analysis yields a measure of the relative importance of priors and signals on subjects' beliefs on contributions and allows us to conclude that, first, the weight of the signal is relatively unimportant, while priors have a...

Unlike Psychology, laboratory experiments in Economics are quite recent. Taking advantage of the main virtues of experiments (replicability and control), Economics researchers have been able to test existing theory and contribute new evidence to the development of new models of human behavior. This paper provides a short review of the origins and s...

This paper uses subjects’ diverse self-reported justifications to explain discrepancies between observed heterogeneous behavior and the unique equilibrium prediction in a one-shot traveler's dilemma experiment. Principal components analysis suggests that iterative reasoning, aspiration levels, competitive behavior, attitudes towards risk and penalt...

Unlike psychology, laboratory experiments in economics are quite recent. Taking advantage of the main virtues of experiments (replicability and control), economics researchers have been able to test existing theory and contribute new evidence to the development of new models of human behaviour. This paper provides a short review of the origins a...

This paper analyzes auctions for big facilities or contracts where bidders face financial constraints that may force them to resell part of the property of the good (or subcontract part of a project) at a resale market. We show that the interaction between resale and financial constraints changes previous results on auctions with financial constrai...

Published in: Revista Internacional de Sociología (2011), Special Issue on Experimental and Behavioral Economics.

Building on Item Response Theory we introduce students’ optimal behavior in multiple-choice tests. Our simulations indicate that the optimal penalty is relatively high, because although correction for guessing discriminates against risk-averse subjects, this effect is small compared with the measurement error that the penalty prevents. This result...

This paper aims to analyze the role of personal identity in altruism. To this end, it starts by reviewing critically the growing literature on economics and identity. Considering the ambiguities that the concept of social identity poses, our proposal focuses on the concept of personal identity. A formal model to study how personal identity enters i...

We represent the Spanish wholesale market as a supply function com­petition model. Theoretically, the larger generators’ supply curves for each plant should be to the left of the supply curves of plants owned by smaller generators. We test this prediction for fuel plants using data from the Spanish Market Op­erator (OMEL) from January 2002 to Decem...

We report on a two-stage experiment in which (i) we first elicit the social network within a section of undergraduate students and (ii) we then measure their altruistic attitudes by means of a standard Dictator game. We observe that more socially integrated subjects are also more altruistic, as betweenness centrality and reciprocal degree are posit...

We use hourly bid data from the Spanish day-ahead electricity auction to obtain a lower bound measure of generators' market power. Our method is not based on cost estimates but rather on the different behavior of strategic generators as compared to the behavior of more competitive producers. The results indicate that, despite the price cap effect o...

This paper uses subjects’ self-reported justifications to explain discrepancies between observed heterogeneous behavior and the unique equilibrium prediction in a one-shot traveler’s dilemma experiment (TD). Principal components (PC) analysis suggests that iterative reasoning, aspiration levels, competitive behavior, attitudes towards risk and pena...

This paper analyzes the process of endogenous union formation in the context of a sequential bargaining model between a firm and several unions and tries to explain why workers may be represented by several unions of different sizes. We show that the equilibrium number of unions and their relative size depend on workers' attitudes toward the risk o...

Empirical results are presented showing that people who acknowledge pain anticipation when expecting an injury experience higher sensitivity to pain (GREP, Robinson et al., 2001). The positive correlation between sensitivity and anticipation is highly significant. However, no relationship is found between anticipation and pain endurance.

This paper analyzes the process of endogenous union formation in the context of a sequential bargaining model between a firm and several unions and tries to explain why workers may be represented by several unions of different sizes. We show that the equilibrium number of unions and their relative size depend on workers' attitudes toward the risk o...

In this paper we present experimental results concerning the beliefs that subjects hold about the weight of selfishness on decision, compared to the social norm that would prescribe a more generous behavior. The main conclusion is that subjects underestimate selfishness.

This paper explores new motivations behind giving. Specifically, it focuses on personal involvement and responsibility to explain why decision makers give positive amounts in dictatorial decisions. The experiment is designed to uncover these motivations. Subjects face the problem of a dictator’s allocation of an indivisible amount to one of two pla...

Also published as Working Paper DFAEII 2009-05 and as an article in: Games and Economic Behavior, 2010, vol. 69, issue 2, pages 249-257.

This paper analyzes union formation in a model of bargaining between a firm and several unions. We address two questions: first, the optimal con.guration of unions (their number and size) and, second, the impact of the bargaining pattern (simultaneous or sequential). For workers, grouping into several unions works as a price discrimination device w...

This paper uses subjects' self-reported justifications to explain discrepancies between observed heterogeneous behavior and the unique equilibrium prediction in a one-shot traveler's dilemma experiment (TD). Principal components (PC) analysis suggests that iterative reasoning, aspiration levels, competitive behavior, attitudes towards risk and pena...

This paper analyzes the impact of social integration on cooperative behavior. We show that if the social network shows assortative mixing then conditional cooperation is an equilibrium strategy for altruistic subjects with a high degree of social integration.We provide experimental evidence on the relationship between individuals’ position in a soc...

http://adsabs.harvard.edu//abs/2007AIPC..887..260B COOPERATIVE BEHAVIOR IN NEURAL SYSTEMS: Ninth Granada Lectures. AIP Conference Proceedings, Volume 887, pp. 260-260 (2007). This paper explores the role of social integration on altruistic behavior. To this aim, we develop a two-stage experimental protocol based on the classic Dictator Game. In the...

Subjects’ decisions in multiple-choice tests are an interesting domain for the analysis of decision making under uncertainty. When the test is graded using a rule that penalizes wrong answers, each item can be viewed as a lottery where a rational examinee would choose whether to omit (sure reward) or answer (take the lottery) depending on risk aver...

This paper aims to analize the role of personal identity in decision making. To this end, it starts by reviewing critically the growing literature on economics and identity. Considering the ambiguities that the concept of social identity poses, our proposal focuses on the concept of personal identity. A formal model to study how personal identity e...

This paper analyzes the emerging literature on the determinants of giving within a social network. We propose two main explanatory variables for previous experimental results on the friendship effect. The first is social integration, which has a positive impact on giving. The second variable is strategic and is based on reciprocity: the possibility...

In this paper we check whether generators' bid behavior at the Spanish wholesale electricity market is consistent with the hypothesis of pro?fit maximization on their residual demands. Using OMEL data, we ?find the arc-elasticity of the residual demand around the system marginal price. The results suggest that the larger ?firms are not actually pro...

A disadvantage of multiple-choice tests is that students have incentives to guess. To discourage guessing, it is common to use scoring rules that either penalize wrong answers or reward omissions. These scoring rules are considered equivalent in psychometrics, although experimental evidence has not always been consistent with this claim. We model s...

We model the Spanish wholesale market as a multiplant linear supply function competition model. According to the theory, the larger generators should have supply curves for each plant which are to the left of the supply curves of plants owned by smaller generators. We test this prediction for fuel plants using data from the Spanish Market Operator...

This paper explores new motivations behind giving. Specifically, it focuses on personal involvement and responsibility to explain why decision makers give positive amounts in dictatorial decisons. The experiment is designed to uncover these motivations. Subjects face the problem of a dictator's allocation of an indivisible pie P to one of two playe...

This paper analyzes union formation in a model of bargaining between a .firm and several unions. We address two questions: .first, the optimal configuration of unions (their number and size) and, second, the impact of the bargaining pattern (simultaneous or sequential). For workers, grouping into several unions works as a price discrimination devic...

Ideally we would like subjects of experiments to be perfect strangers so that the situation they face at the lab is not just a part of a long run interaction. Unfortunately, it is not easy to reach those conditions and experimenters try to mitigate any effects coming form these out-of- the-lab relationships by, for instance, randomly matching subje...

In the context of the recent electricity market reforms in Europe and the US, we evaluate the performance of the Spanish pool. Our method is not based on price-cost estimates but rather on the different behavior of generators with higher market power as compared to the behavior of more competitive producers. Our results indicate that the two larger...

We analyze the consequences of consumers' behavior concerning personal arbitrage in a spatial discrimination context where firms know consumers distribution but cannot distinguish them by location. The firms' equilibrium pricing policies provide incentives for consumers not to demand their preferred varieties of products but rather to purchase more...

We analyze the consequences of consumers behavior concerning personal arbitrage in a spatial discrimination context where firms know the consumers distribution but cannot distinguish them by location. The firms' equilibrium pricing policies provide incentives for consumers not to demand their preferred varieties of products but rather to purchase m...

Published as an article in: Games and Economic Behavior, 2003, vol. 44, issue 1, pages 183-194.

We analyze the formation of competing partnerships as a sequential game with moral hazard within coalitions. In a linear Cournot model, we show that when moral hazard is very severe, no partnerships will form. However, when moral hazard is not too severe, the coalition structure may be more concentrated than it is in the absence of moral hazard. Co...

We analyze the formation of partnerships as a sequential choice-of-sizes game with moral hazard within coalitions; once formed, partnerships compete a la Cournot in the marketplace. We show that when moral hazard within coalitions is very severe, no partnership will form. However, when moral hazard is not too severe the coalition structure will be...

In this paper we identify what kind of market structures result from the application of Nash and coalition-proof Nash notions to a class of non cooperative games that we call Cournot merger games. We determine a critical size of market structure r and find that all market structures of sizes greater than r even if they contain firms with negative p...

The paper examines the heterogeneity with respect to the impact of a financial reform - Activity Based Financing (ABF) - on hospital efficiency in Norway. Measures of technical efficiency and of cost-efficiency are considered. The data set is from a contiguous ten-year panel of 47 hospitals covering both pre-ABF years and years after its imposition...

We address the problem of endogenous coalition formation in Cournot oligopoly markets. The formation of coalitions is formalised as an abstract system where the elements of the abstract set are derived from a valuation function and the dominance relation specifies the rules of coalition formation. We focus on a particular instance of this approach:...

In this paper, we analyse under what conditions it is profitable for a multi-divisional firm to encourage divisions to perform independent R&D, and when it is better to centralize R&D so that the level be chosen co-operatively. Under Bertrand competition, firms always centralize R&D decisions. Under Cournot competition, however, with divisions of t...

This note reinforces the results in a paper by Sen (1993). It is shown that his assumption that the incentive schemes in a two-period model are the same for the two periods is not necessary for the results: only the long-term nature of contracts with managers matters. Copyright 2000 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the Board of Trustees of the Bulle...

This paper examines bilateral double taxation treaties, with an emphasis on information exchange among tax authorities. A major objective is to understand which countries are more likely to sign a tax-relief treaty and when information-exchange clauses will be added to a treaty. A simple model with two asymmetric countries and repeated interactions...

A vast and often confusing economics literature relates competition to investment in innovation. Following Joseph Schumpeter, one view is that monopoly and large scale promote investment in research and development by allowing a firm to capture a larger fraction of its benefits and by providing a more stable platform for a firm to invest in R&D. Ot...