Neslihan Uler

University of Maryland, College Park | UMD, UMCP, University of Maryland College Park · Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics

Governments often impose price floors to protect sellers against low prices in markets characterized by uncertainty. Hard floors arise in grain and currency markets whenever the government acquisitions at the support price are unconstrained. Soft floors arise whenever such acquisitions are subject to a binding constraint. An important special case...

We examine how taxes impact charitable giving and how this relationship is affected by the degree of wasteful government spending. In our model, individuals make donations to charities knowing that the government collects a flat-rate tax on income (net of charitable donations) and redistributes part of the tax revenue. The rest of the tax revenue i...

We use “real donation” laboratory experiments to compare independent fundraising, where donation requests from different charities arrive sequentially to potential donors, with coordinated fundraising, where donation requests from different charities arrive simultaneously. We find that coordinated fundraising generates significantly larger total do...

Voluntary carbon markets present firms and individuals with the opportunity to offset all or part of their carbon footprints. We report on a controlled laboratory experiment to understand the behavioral motivations driving the purchase of carbon offsets, in addition to investigating the effect of the introduction of voluntary carbon markets on emis...

This paper provides a new explanation for lower levels of public good provision in heterogeneous societies compared to their homogeneous counterparts. Social sharing norms force rich individuals to share part of their income with their poor relatives, but do not apply across different ethnic groups. Because there is a more extensive redistribution...

We study how giving depends on income and luck, and how culture and information about the determinants of others’ income affect this relationship. Our data come from an experiment conducted in two countries, the USA and Spain – each of which have different beliefs about how income inequality arises. We find that when individuals are informed about...

We study how competition among charities affects individuals’ giving behavior. We characterize situations where charities benefitting substitute or complementary causes incentivize donations by offering subsidies in the form of rebates. Our theory predicts that an increase in the rebate rate offered by a given charity relative to a substitute chari...

We examine the impact of taxes and wasteful government spending on charitable giving. In our model, the government collects a flat-rate tax on income net of donations and wastes part of the tax revenue before redistribution. The model provides theoretical predictions which we test in a framed field experiment. The results of the experiment show tha...

We study how giving depends on income and luck, and how culture and information about the determinants of others’ income affect this relationship. Our data come from an experiment conducted in two countries, the US and Spain, which have different beliefs about how income inequality arises. We find no cross-cultural differences in giving when indivi...

Authority, and the behavioral response to authority, is central to many important questions in public economics, but has received insufficient attention from economists. In particular, research has not differentiated between legitimate power and the presumption of expert knowledge, what we call authority “to” and authority “in.” In this paper we re...

This paper explores how a reference point affects individual preferences. While reference-dependence is extensively studied, very little is known regarding the impact of reference points on individual choice behavior when the reference point itself is abandoned. We show that reference-dependence is not limited to the endowment effect and status quo...

When every individual's effort imposes negative externalities, self-interested behavior leads to socially excessive effort. To curb these excesses when effort cannot be monitored, competing output-sharing partnerships can form. With the right-sized groups, aggregate effort falls to the socially optimal level. We investigate this theory experimental...

This paper tests the behavioral equivalence of a class of strategically-equivalent mechanisms that also do not differ in terms of their procedures. In a private value setting, we introduce a family of mechanisms, so-called Mechanism (α), that generalizes the standard first-price sealed-bid auction. In Mechanism (α), buyers are asked to submit a val...

We compare the determinants of individual giving between two countries, Spain and the US, which differ in their redistribution policies and their beliefs over the causes of poverty. By varying the information about the determinants of income, we find that, although overall giving is similar in both countries when subjects know the actual role of lu...

The impact of redistributive policies on voluntary contributions is still not well under-stood. While a higher level of redistributive taxation decreases the price of voluntary giving, it also changes the income distribution by decreasing income inequality. This paper provides a controlled laboratory experiment to investigate the net impact of the...

Individuals extracting common-pool resources in the field sometimes form output-sharing groups to avoid costs of crowding. In theory, if the right number of groups forms, Nash equilibrium aggregate effort should fall to the socially optimal level. Whether individuals manage to form the efficient number of groups and to invest within the chosen grou...

The impact of redistributive policies on voluntary contributions is still not well understood. While a higher level of redistributive taxation decreases the price of voluntary giving, it also changes the income distribution by decreasing income inequality. This paper provides a controlled laboratory experiment to investigate the net impact of the t...

We use General Social Survey data to test our theory's prediction that voluntary giving increases with inequality aversion for high income individuals, and that the opposite is true for low income individuals. We find strong support for our theoretical predictions.

This paper studies the relationship between redistributive taxation and tax-deductible charitable contributions. Redistribution has two opposite effects on voluntary giving. The price of charitable giving decreases with the degree of redistribution, and this has a positive effect on the total amount of giving (substitution effect). However, redistr...

This paper focuses on the relationship between voluntary giving and the degree of inequality aversion. Our model suggests that voluntary giving is increasing in the degree of inequality aversion for individuals of higher than average income; however, the sign of the effect is reversed for individuals that are poorer than the average. Contributions...

This paper examines the relationship between the level of charitable giving and the level of taxation. The theoretical model shows that although charitable contributions decrease with pre-tax income equality, they strictly increase with tax rate. The experimental ndings support the theoretical predictions. The participants decrease their voluntary...

This paper compares reference-dependent models which differ not only in nature but also in methodology. While the behavioral models take a radical step to explain choice anomalies, decision theorists insist that a modified version of the classical choice theory can accommodate them. The first part of the paper is devoted to the con-struction of fra...

This paper considers a voluntary public good provision problem in a society where egalitarian social norms impose income redistribution between agents: rich individuals are forced to share part of their wealth with their poor rela-tives. The level of public good provision is examined by varying the degree of redistribution and the ex-ante income in...

This paper provides a new explanation for the observed dierences in the levels of public good provision in heterogeneous societies compared to the homogeneous coun- terparts. Consider a voluntary public good provision problem where egalitarian social norms impose income redistribution between agents: rich individuals are forced to share part of the...

We consider a voluntary public good provision problem in a society, where egalitarian social norms force rich individuals to share some part of their wealth with their poor relatives. We study the level of public good provision by vary- ing the degree of egalitarianism and ex-ante income inequality. We show that contributions to the public good are...

The Revelation Principle depends on a seemingly innocuous assumption that theoretically outcome-equivalent (TOE) mechanisms are behaviorally equivalent as well. However, this strong assertion has not yet been tested in previous experimental studies. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap. We settled on thefirst-price sealed-bid auction as our indir...