Swee-Hoon Chuah

• BBus, LLB, MBA, PhD
• Professor at University of Tasmania

International aid charities face a dilemma by virtue of the White Saviour: Appeal photos of Caucasian helpers in Global South settings can build a bridge to donors or cause donor resentment with changing social norms. We examine four resulting empirical questions using a series of online studies: What is the White Saviour? How do White Saviour perc...

We introduce behavioural economics from a methodological perspective, i.e. by outlining its ‘Hows’. We focus on three main methodological features: (1) The use of quantitative empirical methods from behavioural science, (2) the application of the resulting behavioural insights to explain economic phenomena under (3) the adherence to the traditional...

We present an exploratory study to examine the antecedents of artrepreneurship, the decision of artists to commercialise the fruits of their practice. We hypothesise and test the influence of three key drivers using a questionnaire-based study with 93 practicing artists. While a number of factors from individual difference psychology are significan...

There are anecdotal parallels between the productive activities, labour market conditions and policy importance of professional artists and entrepreneurs that suggest human capital similarities between them. We examine the psychological and behavioural characteristics associated with the pursuits of artistry and entrepreneurship. We conducted a lab...

We present an exploratory study to examine the antecedents of artrepreneurship, the decision of artists to commercialise the fruits of their practice. We hypothesise and test the influence of three key drivers using a questionnaire-based study with 93 practicing artists. While a number of factors from individual difference psychology are significan...

Despite strong professional practice norms experimental economists are increasingly subject to sweeping ethics review processes. A central issue in these processes is the recruitment of students as “overresearched” participants. We critically discuss the potential associated ethical risks typically identified in ethics regulations. We then test the...

Self-interested paid advisors should try to sell their solutions no matter how they came about. However, we present evidence that advisor persuasiveness depends on two dimensions of their prior problem solving: solution difficulty and demonstrability. We report a laboratory experiment with repeated advisor-client interactions where both these dimen...

Does greater knowledge help or hinder one’s ability to coordinate with others? While individual expertise can reveal a suitable focal point to converge on, ‘blissful’ ignorance may systematically bias decisions towards it through mere recognition. Our experiment finds in favour of the former possibility. Both specific and general knowledge are sign...

Conflict has been shown to have large and long lasting impacts on ethnic groups. We examine the origin of this effect in social capital depreciation when past conflict experience aggravates anti-social behaviour. We conducted a money-burning field experiment to examine how the 1976–2005 conflict in Aceh, Indonesia affects current interactions betwe...

Cambridge Core - Computing and Society - Social Interactions in Virtual Worlds - edited by Kiran Lakkaraju

Social Interactions in Virtual Worlds - edited by Kiran Lakkaraju July 2018

Financial decision makers (lenders, insurers, advisees) often need to estimate how well others make decisions. Is knowledge a blessing or a curse when forecasting others' forecast accuracy? The authors show that this depends on its type. Within a single experimental setting, they identify and test 4 distinct information types that have different ef...

Financial decision makers (lenders, insurers, advisees) often need to estimate how well others make decisions. Is knowledge a blessing or a curse when forecasting others' forecast accuracy? The authors show that this depends on its type. Within a single experimental setting, they identify and test 4 distinct information types that have different ef...

Purpose The potential for e-commerce is limited by a trust deficit when traders do not interact in a physical, bricks-and-mortar context. The theory of information richness posits that equivocal interactions, such as ones requiring trust, can be facilitated through communication media that transmit multiple cues interactively. This study aims to ex...

The economic miracle of the Chinese Diaspora in Southeast Asia has been attributed to their unique economic culture forged from Confucian thought and the emigration experience. However, this Spirit of Overseas Chinese Capitalism (SOCC) hypothesis, based largely on qualitative research, has not been validated through quantitative work. This paper pr...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study the influence of user personality and values on the number of connections users make, the number of requests for connections that users give out, and the number of connection invitations users receive. Design/methodology/approach This is a field study of 179 participants interacting in a novel virtual...

We investigate how the experience of influencing and of being influenced impacts on a subsequent, immediate attempt to influence and be influenced. We conduct an experiment using participant dyads matched in a round-robin design which systematically measures the influence one individual has on another in a decision task using a short, anonymous, co...

We propose that religion impacts trust and trustworthiness in ways that depend on how individuals are socially identified and connected. Religiosity and religious affiliation may serve as markers for statistical discrimination. Further, affiliation to the same religion may enhance group identity, or affiliation irrespective of creed may lend social...

We test experimentally whether decisions in 2 × 2 games with mixed equilibria depend on the co-player being nature or a human agent. Controlling for social preferences, we find differences in decisions in the chicken game and battle of the sexes but not for stag hunt and matching pennies. We attribute these to subjects' perception of the other's in...

The importance of Chinese culture in cross-national negotiation has become conventional wisdom in international business research and practice. However, empirical work has not sufficiently established whether, how and under what conditions specific cultural values of the Chinese affect their negotiation decisions. This paper reports an experiment w...

We examine elicitation effects in a multi-stage bargaining experiment with escalating stakes conducted under direct-response and strategy-method elicitation. We find a significantly greater incidence of decisions leading to bargaining failure under direct responses. In addition, the predictive power of alternative risk attitude measures differs bet...

A naturalistic public good experiment is used to examine whether better players cooperate more or less than others. ‘Better’ is measured by subjects’ accuracy in a team-based shooting game, and cooperation is measured by introducing a public good decision into the game. A data set of 92 subjects was created and results show that better players coop...

This paper examines the determinants of friendship between two users in a virtual world who are unaware of each other's real identities. Drawing on theories of homophily, heterophily and propinquity, three virtual world behaviours are analysed: avatar appearance, avatar location, and avatar communication. Data are collected on 179 participants inte...

This paper reports a study which examined the impact of computer game experience on behaviour observed inside a virtual world. A social networking world was used, which was owned and run by the research team and a dataset capturing the behaviour of 195 subjects was extracted from the world's event logs. Four broad areas were analysed: communication...

Is India’s high fractionalization associated with mistrust between its two main religious communities? An inter-ethnic trust game field experiment confirms intergroup bias in mutually lower offers between urban Muslims and Hindus in Mumbai. There are no differences in trustworthiness based on the religion of responders or of the co-players they res...

Purpose It has been argued that the insights provided by behavioural economics have profound implications for the study and practice of marketing. The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed analysis of how such insights help enhance understanding of aspects of marketing and consumer behaviour in financial services markets. Design/methodolo...

The standard chicken game is a popular model of certain important real scenarios but does not allow for the escalation behavior these are typically associated with. This is problematic if the critical, final decisions in these scenarios are sensitive to previous escalation. We introduce and analyze, theoretically and by experiment, a new game which...

In contrast to current literature which mainly identifies relationships between particular economic behaviours and specific attitudes suggestive of those behaviours, we explore the potential of general human values for explaining economic behaviour. In particular, we investigate whether behaviours observed in binary-choice lotteries, time discounti...

We examine bargaining behaviour in experimental ultimatum games with Malaysian and UK subjects. Significant differences in offer levels between the two national groups are explained with reference to differences in their responses to particular dimensions of the World Values Survey questionnaire. These attitudinal differences are interpreted as cul...

We explore the scientific potential of virtual worlds for experimental economics in terms of the subject pools and experimental platforms they present. Our results offer tentative, qualified support for virtual world experimentation. Overall, the behaviour of virtual subjects recruited, incentivised and observed within Second Life across a range of...

This paper reports decision-making experiments designed to assess to what extent trade in virtual environments can reduce the trust deficit commonly associated with traditional e-commerce compared with 'physical' trade. Our approach is based on previous findings that trust is related to the degree of social presence the electronic interface permits...

We explore the scientific potential of virtual worlds for experimental economics in terms of the subject pools and experimental platforms they present. Our results offer tentative, qualified support for virtual world experimentation. Overall, the behaviour of virtual subjects recruited, incentivised and observed within Second Life across a range of...

[eng] Transportation costs and monopoly location in presence of regional disparities. . This article aims at analysing the impact of the level of transportation costs on the location choice of a monopolist. We consider two asymmetric regions. The heterogeneity of space lies in both regional incomes and population sizes: the first region is endowed...

This paper presents experimental evidence demonstrating that agents' knowledge of strategy alternatives in pure coordination games is inversely correlated with decision-making efficacy. Alternative theoretical accounts of players' choice processes in coordination games are considered to shed light on our empirical results.

Measurement activities are central to virtually all technical activities including engineering, construction and scientific research. In addition, the standardisation of measurement can generate considerable economies in production and exchange interactions between economic agents. This paper discusses the evolution of measurement standards from th...

We analyse the possibility of successful industry self-regulation in terms of the strategic interactions between industry members and government. In particular, this article presents a game-theoretic typology of generic self-regulatory scenarios and evaluates these in terms of the resulting likelihood of collective compliance. We discuss the advert...

The concept of culture is traditionally the home turf of anthropologists. However, economists have become increasingly interested in culture, using the language of culture to study both macro- and micro-level economic phenomena. Anthropologists view this as an encroachment into their territory and are battling to keep the `economic imperialists' ou...