Three Essays on Field and Lab-in-the-Field Experiments in Economics.

摘要

The first chapter contributes to the debate about culture as potential determinantof economic growth by investigating the prevalence of six widely discussed norms ofdistributive justice in poor, rural communities of Malawi. Specifically, the distributionover strict egalitarianism, inequality aversion, liberal egalitarianism, luck egalitarianism, libertarianism, and the principle of equality of opportunity is determined using alab-in-the-field experiment. I am using a two-person dictator game with a productionphase. I find that decisions are mainly guided by strict egalitarianism and libertarianism, and less strongly by other norms. Interestingly, despite the large inuence ofstrict egalitarianism, subjects react significantly to all experimental variations.The second chapter draws lessons from an original randomized experiment inMalawi. In order to understand why roads in relatively good condition in rural areasmay not be used by buses, a minibus service was subsidized over a six month periodover a distance of 20 kilometres to serve five villages. Using randomly allocated pricesfor use of the bus, this experiment demonstrates that at very low prices, bus usageis high. Bus usage decreases rapidly with increased prices. However, based on theresults on take-up and minibus provider surveys, this experiment demonstrates thatat any price, low (with high usage) or high (with low usage), a bus service providernever breaks even on this road.The third chapter explores the effect of incomplete information about pie size onsocial norms motivated by the following observations: (a) cultural norms regardingdistributive justice may be fully internalized by a population or be domain-specificto a particular informational environment and (b) each scenario may lead to differentimpacts on growth and development in dynamic surroundings. The chapter studieshow divisions of an effort-generated social surplus depend on whether the receiver ina dictator game knows the size of the social surplus or not. I find that while dictatorsact more selfish under incomplete information the effect is small compared to theeffects norms of distributive justice have on decision making.