Essays in Behavioural and Experimental Economics

This thesis contains three essays in Behavioural and Experimental Economics. In Chapter 1, I investigate what effect growing up as an only-child has on social and risk preferences, trust, and behaviour in strategic interaction. To do that, I use data from a laboratory experiment in which university students participated in three different games (a public goods game, a response game, and an investment game) and in a task for eliciting risk preferences. I find that only children are less likely to punish for misbehaviour and more likely to choose social welfare maximising actions in response games. Only-children are, however,significantly less likely to cooperate in one-shot public goods games and are less trusting than subjects with siblings. In Chapter 2, Professor Friederike Mengel, Professor Simon Weidenholzer and I study decisions in infinitely repeated games. Using data from previous prisoner’s dilemma games and data from our own experiment, we assess subjects’ cooperation rates and show that realized match length of early matches has a significant impact on the cooperation rates of subsequent matches. We furthermore demonstrate that the effect is in line with a class of learning models displaying the “power law of practice”. In Chapter 3, I use data from a dictator game where information about receiver’s deservingness is endogenously determined by the receiver’s decision to disclose information. I therefore explore whether receivers voluntarily provide information about their deservingness and the effect of endogenous information on dictators’ decision. I find that receivers having deservingness levels far from the median level of deservingness in a session are significantly less likely to disclose information about their deservingness. Furthermore, the choice to disclose information is related to the receivers’ beliefs about dictators’ actions. I also show that dictators give more when information is endogenous than in the case in which it is exogenously provided.