Individualized Goals  /  Policy Design, 2014

Goals for Small Firms  /  Policy Design, 2014

Published Papers

Know Your Neighbor: The Impact of Social Context on Fairness Behavior
With N. Sircar, P. van der Windt, and M. Voors
PLoS ONE, 2018, 13:4
  • Laboratory experiments offer an opportunity to isolate human behaviors with a level of precision that is often difficult to obtain using other (survey-based) methods. Yet, experimental tasks are often stripped of any social context, implying that inferences may not directly map to real world contexts. We randomly allocate 632 individuals (grouped randomly into 316 dyads) from small villages in Sierra Leone to four versions of the ultimatum game. In addition to the classic ultimatum game, where both the sender and receiver are anonymous, we reveal the identity of the sender, the receiver or both. This design allows us to explore how fairness behavior is affected by social context in a natural setting where players are drawn from populations that are well-acquainted. We find that average offers increase when the receiver’s identity is revealed, suggesting that anonymous ultimatum games underestimate expected fair offers. This study suggest that researchers wishing to relate laboratory behav- ior to contexts in which the participants are well-acquainted should consider revealing the identities of the players during game play.


From Personalized Exchange Towards Anonymous Trade: A Field Experiment on the Workings of the Invisible Hand
With E. Bulte, A. Kontoleon, J. List, and M. Voors
The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2017, 133, 313-330.
  • The experimental literature has shown the tendency for experimental trading markets to converge to neoclassical predictions. Yet, the extent to which theory explains the equilibrating forces in markets remains under-researched, especially in the developing world. We set up a laboratory in 94 villages in rural Sierra Leone to mimic a real market. In this laboratory market, where individuals interact with co-villagers, average efficiency is somewhat lower than predicted by theory (and observed in different contexts), and markets do not converge to theoretical predictions across rounds of trading. Similar results are found when villagers trade with (unknown) people from another village, suggesting that market efficiency is not impeded by factors associated with personalized exchange (e.g., local socio-economic structures––status, trust, patron-client relations). We do find that efficiency levels increase considerably in treatments where face-to-face haggling is eliminated and trading occurs via middlemen.


Chief for a Day: Elite Capture and Management Performance in a Field Experiment in Sierra Leone
With M. Voors, E. Bulte, A. Kontoleon, and J. List
Management Science, 2017 
  • This paper uses a field experiment in Sierra Leone to examine how the identity of the manager influences rent seeking and performance in participatory development projects.  Specifically, we vary the composition of the committee responsible for implementing a development project—local elites or randomly selected villagers.  The design is unique, in that it permits us to explore the effectiveness of two alternative local governance modalities and the extent of elite capture in community projects.  We find little evidence that local elites capture project resources, but we do observe they are better managers of development projects.  Improved performance co-varies with our proxy for power of the local chief.

Using Artefactual Field Experiments to Learn about the Incentives for Sustainable Forest Use in Developing Countries
With M. Voors, E. Bulte, A. Kontoleon, and J. List
American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, 2011, 101:3, 1-7.
  • Within developed and developing countries alike, misuse of fresh water, pastures, and forests is commonplace. While developed countries have in many cases designed principles and laws to promote sustainable resource use, developing countries often lack the institutional know-how and means to enforce property rights. This has led researchers to look for alternative means to address common property resource problems. We study behavior and attitudes towards forest conservation in Sierra Leone and aim for two contributions related to common property resources. First, we attempt to establish if artifactual field experiments (AFEs) can explain behavior in the field. If AFEs can explain variability in treatment of the commons, then we can have greater confidence in test-bedding mechanisms in the laboratory and transferring the lessons learned to naturally occurring settings. Allowing heterogeneity in the shift parameters yields potentially very different relative rankings across the lab and field. Given that we both i) observe people in the lab (in AFEs) and ii) gather information on their behavior in the field (in a social intervention and in related surveys of household behavior), we can test whether relative rankings are preserved between the lab and field. Our second contribution is to examine if social phenomena that are rarely explored, such as having a relative killed in civil war or living in a community with strong beliefs in witchcraft, directly influence social preferences and treatment of the common property resource. People in the Gola Forest region of southeastern Sierra Leone experienced high levels of violence during the civil war of 1992 to 2002.

Exploring whether behavior in context-free experiments is predictive of behavior in the field: Evidence from lab and field experiments in rural Sierra Leone
With M. Voors, E. Bulte, A. Kontoleon, and J. List
​Economic Letters, 2012, 114:3
  • We use a sample of subsistence farmers in Sierra Leone as respondents to compare behavior in a context-free experiment (a standard public goods game) and behavior in the field (a real development intervention). There is no meaningful correlation in behavior across contexts. This casts doubt on the prospect of using lab experiments as ‘‘predictors’’ of behavior in real life.

Working Papers

Measuring Discrimination in Local and Social Context
With N. Sircar, P. van der Windt, and M. Voors
  • We use a sample of 736 respondents from 46 remote villages in Sierra Leone to compare differential behavior towards social status groups in standard anonymous experiments (an attribute based dictator game) and behavior in experiments when the identity of each receiver is revealed. We find that behavior in standard experimental games does not directly correlate with behavior when context is taken into account, suggesting that individual behavior is likely to be swamped by social considerations. This implies standard experiments suffer from aggregation bias: ie, abstracting from full information about each individual receiver to the distribution of receivers types. Inferences about (social) cleavages drawn from context free experiments may hence be limited. Social differentiation may have real world consequences; discrimination based on social status is believed to be a major cause of the civil war in Sierra Leone.


You Get What You Deserve: Experimental Evidence on Redistribution Preferences in China, Paraguay and Uganda
With S. Leone
  • We run an experiment in China, Paraguay and Uganda to determine how preferences for redistribution depend on the cause of the original inequality. Unlike previous studies, we move beyond the rudimentary luck/skill distinction in designing the activities subjects use to generate their income. First, we employ tasks that differentiate between two types of luck: (1) chance, in which the subject’s payoff is the realization of a lottery chosen exogenously by the experimenter, and (2) risk, in which the subject herself chooses between lotteries with known payoff distributions. Second, we decompose skill into its constituent categories: (a) aptitude, as measured by an IQ test, and (b) effort, as measured by a computerized real-effort task that controls for baseline ability. We hypothesize that subjects will exhibit a preference for redistributing their group’s income in order to achieve a more equitable distribution, and that the magnitude of this preference is decreasing with how much control subjects feel they have over their income level. Specifically, we hypothesize that redistribution levels will consistently be greatest in the chance treatment and least in the effort treatment, and that we can predict the likelihood of subjects redistributing more income from risk than from aptitude based on a priori knowledge about a country’s average beliefs about locus of control. Though some of our results are only marginally statistically significant, we find that we can confirm our hypothesized universal attitudes toward chance and effort. Furthermore, Ugandan subjects, with on average an external locus of control, exhibit higher redistribution for aptitude relative to risk, whereas Chinese and Paraguayan subjects, with on average an internal locus of control, exhibit the opposite. Our results are related to the question of designing optimal tax policies when inequality arises, or is perceived to arise, from different sources.

Sanctioning Regimes and Chief Quality: Evidence from Rural Liberia
With G. Beekman, E. Nillesen, and M. Voors
  • We investigate how the quality of local village leaders operating under different institutional regimes in Liberia impacts on public goods provision. To this end, we conduct a public goods experiment under two different institutional regimes. As a proxy for local leadership quality we use the share of missing inputs provided by the research team prior to the research activities in the village. Our participants play multiple rounds of a standard public goods game under several treatment conditions where either the village chief or a randomly chosen villager acts as a monitor or has the ability to sanction players, and where sanctioning is either incentivized or not. We then ask participants to play multiple rounds of the game of their own preference. We find that public goods provision increases when uncooperative behaviour can be sanctioned. We also find that leadership quality seems to matter, but only under an adverse institutional regime. Our results thus imply that external institutional conditions overrule the impact from “endogenous” leadership quality.

Bargaining Markets, Information Asymmetry, and Social Capital: Functioning Markets in the Face of Market Failure
With M. Ross and M. Voors
  • Social capital has been studied by economists at the micro-level in efforts to understand how it contributes to the functioning and growth of markets. In developing countries, where markets frequently have poor information and weak enforcement mechanisms, social capital is considered to play a larger role in facilitating markets to properly function — filling the vacuum of formal institutions and government intervention. This paper tests these theories with a market experiment set in eastern Sierra Leone. We introduce market imperfections in the form of information asymmetries and assess how well markets function when traders are known to one another, versus when they are strangers. We use four treatment variations to isolate effects of social-connectedness and incomplete information. We find that socially connected individuals do transact with a higher level of fairness in surplus capture compared to trades between strangers when information asymmetries are present. Our results lead us to conclude that social capital may help markets to continue to function when otherwise they may fail, but they are not an adequate substitute for formal institutions and government intervention as markets perform significantly below optimal conditions.

Works in Progress

“Selfish Chiefs make Selfish Followers: Evidence from a Public Goods Game”
With E. Bulte and M. Voors

“Social Constraints and Resource Misallocation: Experimental Evidence among IDPs in Georgia”
With S. Levitt and J. List

“Who is My Neighbor: Lying to Steal Resources from Neighbors and Aid Organizations”
With M. Voors and M. Handgraaf

“Democratic Elections, Enfranchisement, and Social Preferences: Experiments in Mali”
With M. Voors

“Aspirational Encouragement versus Overwhelming Discouragement: How to Inspire Microfinance Borrowers in Paraguay”
With J. Brewer and D. Shaner

“Recovering Opportunity Costs with Reverse Auctions for Ecosystem Services in Northern Ghana”
With M. Jones and D. van Soest

“Loss Aversion in Payments for Ecosystem Services: A Field Experiment in Ghana”
With M. Jones and D. van Soest

Economics Positions Held

May 2012 - July 2019
Consultant
The World Bank

May 2016 - November 2017
Research Fellow
Roots Social Impact Group
​
September 2013 - August 2017
Assistant Professor
Romney Institute of Public Management, Marriott School of Management, Brigham Young University

January - August 2017
Visiting Scholar
Department of Economics, New York University

January - June 2015
Visiting Scholar
Jameel Poverty Action Lab, Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Academic Economics from April 2018 (I am no longer actively doing research in economics)
CV

Google Scholar page

Economics Teaching

Behavioral Design

This course combined a survey of theoretical insights from behavioral economics with principles of human-centered design and social design. It was a studio course that allowed the students to work in teams on projects for external partners. I taught a similar course in the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University twice in 2016.

Syllabus

International Development Policy

A course designed to give masters students a comprehensive understanding of how social scientists use field experiments, or randomized control trials, to evaluate and improve programs and policies in developing countries. It is also designed to compare and contrast how filmmakers and economists approach issues in international development. I taught a similar course in the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University from 2014-2016.

Syllabus

Economic Decision-making for Managers

An introduction to economics for masters students interested in public administration, policy, and local economic development. We talked about current events, with an emphasis on thinking like an economist when analyzing choices and tradeoffs at work or at home. I taught this course in the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University from 2013-2015.

Syllabus