Program > Abstracts

List of abstracts

Monday, 20 May 2019.

The American fortunes of psychology and consumption studies in political economy (1885-1930)

• David Philippy (Université of Lausanne, Centre Walras Pareto)

• Abstract: This paper argues that historical debates on whether the study of consumption should be part of political economy reflect the controversies on the use of psychology by economists. At the end of the 19^th-century, several American economists lamented the absence of works on consumption and urged such studies in the U.S. The American Economic Association, founded in 1885, even created a committee to discuss the issue. For many economists from the “new generation” the new experimental psychology was seen as an opportunity to replace the flawed psychological basis of the “older” one. At the turn of the century, psychology and consumption studies became allies against the dogmatic advocates of laissez-faire. Psychology was perceived as a tool for achieving a more realistic representation of “human basic laws.” Consumption studies were associated with the progressive idea of accounting for the choices made in actual economic and social conditions. However, in the 1930s, both were dragged out from economics. The former was excluded from the new dominant Paretian framework (Hicks, Samuelson), and the latter, which was essentially practiced by women home economists, found a place in federal bureaus (to do applied work), and in sociology. What remained was the study of optimizing behavior under constraints.
   
• Time slot: 9h30-10h30

The Disciplinary Mobility of Core Behavioral Economists

• Alexandre Truc (Université Paris 8)

• Abstract: Behavioral economics was founded by two psychologists, Kahneman and Tversky who acquired disciplinary mobility – the ability to publish in multiple disciplines. The goal of this paper is to investigate how disciplinary mobility evolved among core members of the Behavioral Economic Roundtable, an institution central to the history of BE. Using publications patterns, networks, and topical analysis, we show that after the Kahneman's initial mobility, the second generation of behavioral economists understood the interdisciplinarity in two different manners. While some focused on the integration of the early work of KT within economics as a way to revert back to `normal science', others focused instead on extending BE's interdisciplinarity to the full cognitive sciences' nebula. Despite the differences in the way these two communities approached interdisciplinarity, we show that the new disciplinary mobility displayed by some behavioural economists is less integrated with the historical publications of BE, but also that these mobile economists also have a more difficult time integrating their own outside work within economics.
   
• Time slot: 10h30-11h30

Boost vs Nudge - Advancing the Debate

• Till Grüne-Yanoff (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm)
  
   
• Abstract: It is useful to distinguish types amongst the set of non-coercive, non-incentivizing, population-level behavioral interventions. Specifically, we have argued that nudges and boosts should be distinguished according to the mechanisms through which they operate and affect behavior (Grüne-Yanoff & Hertwig 2016, Hertwig & Grüne-Yanoff 2017, Hertwig 2017, Grüne-Yanoff, Marchionni & Feufel 2018). The practical reasons for such a distinction are that they provide the policymaker with a diagnostic test by which one can assess the expected effectiveness and ethical acceptability of yet untested interventions. In this presentation I react to a number of criticisms that have been raised against our proposal. Five kinds of claims can be distinguished. First, boosts are sometimes equated to education, or to system 2 interventions in the dual process framework. Second, it is sometimes claimed that there are many nudge-boost hybrids, which undermine our binary distinction. Third, some of the normative conclusions of our framework are denied, either because nudges are claimed to not exhibit the purported negative consequences, or because boosts fail to have some of the positive consequences. Fourth, boosts are sometimes portrayed as generally more costly and less effective than nudges. Fifth, sometimes the usefulness of our type-distinction and diagnostic test itself is denied. In the presentation I analyze these criticisms, drawing connections between them and offering preliminary responses – thus hoping to further the debate in this fascinating yet controversial domain.

• Time slot: 11h45-12h45

Under Pressure! Nudging Electricity Consumption Within Firms: Feedback from a Field Experiment

• Christophe Charlier(Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS, GREDEG), Gilles Guerassimoff (MINES ParisTech, PSL Research University Center for Applied Mathematics), Ankinée Kirakozian (Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France), Sandrine Selosse (MINES ParisTech, PSL Research University Center for Applied Mathematics)
   
• Abstract: Controlling energy consumption is a serious environmental issue due to global warming and pollution. Public policies are developed in this context. One such policy is the nudge, a form of policy aimed at changing individual behaviors without using financial incentives nor orders, for example by providing information to individuals so as to conduct behaviors in the direction desired by the policymaker. Interestingly "private nudges" can be imagined for companies. Many economists and psychologists have studied the impact of nudges on households' pro-environmental behaviors. Yet, studies focusing on nudging employees' energy use are rare. The objective of our paper is precisely to explore this issue from an empirical point of view with the help of a field experiment. Using a difference-in-difference methodology, the effects of three nudges on employees' energy conservation are tested. The first nudge, "moral appeal", stresses the responsible use of energy regarding environmental stakes. The second one, "social comparison", informs employees on the energy consumption of other firms participating in the experiment. Finally, the third nudge, "stickers", alerts employees about good energy conservation practices. The field experiment was conducted at 47 French companies's sites. Our results stress the complementarity of these nudges. When implemented alone, the three nudges have no significant effects on energy consumption. However, when the moral appeal and social comparison nudges are combined with the stickers one, they become effective.
  
   
• Time slot: 14h00-15h00

Nudges and Goal Setting: Study of the Energy Consumption Behavior of Monegasque Households

• Amel Attour (Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS, GREDEG), Nathalie Lazaric (CNRS GREDEG), Mira Toumi(Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS, GREDEG)
   
• Abstract: The new digital tools offer new opportunities for households to move towards transition and energy sobriety. Indeed, energy consumption is often perceived by households as an indispensable but invisible convenience for which economic mechanisms remain unclear. To increase household and knowledge, technologies are an essential asset in the debate on energy efficiency. The SmartLook project aims to test the ability of voluntary households to reduce their energy consumption when faced to different objectives. In this context, on November 2018, Smartlook experiment was officially launched in the principality of Monaco. The experiment, which will last six months, will be an opportunity to observe what factors are driving the reduction of energy consumption and what information is best able to activate the behavioral change. Households will be divided into four groups which will test several forms of "nudges" for a period of six months. The objective is to be able to replicate this solution on all households in the Principality to achieve the ambitious energy transition goals set by the government within the Principality. "The halving of greenhouse gas emissions in 2030 and carbon neutrality in 2050”. The White Book on the Energy Transition of the Principality of Monaco, published in March 2017, states that "measures must be implemented to enable each individual and each organization to better understand the objectives and implications of the energetic transition ". In fact, mastering and even reducing energy consumption requires both high-performance buildings and equipment and residents who take their share. The SmartLook project is part of this perspective.

• Time slot: 15h00-16h00

Does exposure to violence affect reciprocity? Experimental evidence from the West Bank.

• Elisa Cavatorta (King's College London), Yousef Daoud (Doha Institute of Graduate Studies), Daniel John Zizzo (Newcastle and BENC)
  
   
• Abstract: This paper studies how reciprocity is affected by exposure to violence in early age. We combine a research design that isolates the exogenous exposure to violence with lab-in-the-field experiments to study how reciprocity in the domain of cooperation (conditional cooperation) and in the domain of aggression (retaliation) vary as a result of exposure to violence. We focus on young Palestinians in the West Bank region of the Palestinian territories. We find that Palestinian adolescents more exposed to violence are more sensitive in reciprocal interactions: violence exposure increases retaliatory behavior and conditional cooperation. Our evidence suggests that part of the effect is explained by changes in the beliefs about other people’s behavior. 
  
   
• Time slot: 16h30-17h30

Tuesday, 21 May 2019.

A pluralistic approach of normative behavioural economics.

• Ivan Mitrouchev (Université Reims Champagne Ardennes)
  
   
• Abstract: This paper discusses some pragmatic issues of behavioural welfare economics regarding its ability of being informative for policymaking and proposes an alternative normative approach that responds to these issues. The originality of this approach is to account for four normative criteria currently developed in behavioural economics – respectively experienced utility, true preference, choice-based and opportunity – by giving them equal importance to evaluate different choice situations. I try to improve the understandings of how such a ’pluralistic' approach could be informative for policymaking, especially when the main challenge of this approach is to identify what separate value judgment can designate a specific normative criterion to be best suited for evaluating a given choice situation.
   
• Time slot: 09h30-10h30

When Experimental Psychology Prescribes Legal Rules: Lessons from the Moral Machine Experiment

• Christophe Salvat (CNRS, Centre Gilles-Gaston Granger, AMU, France)
  
   
• Abstract: The article “The Moral Machine Experiment” published by Nature on 24^th October has drawn a lot of attention amongst scientist and philosophers alike. This article is exceptional in more than one way. First, it is published in Nature, whilst dealing on ethics, which is almost unheard of. Second, it gives an account of the biggest experiment undertaken on moral preferences so far and claims to solve one of the most controversial ethical issue raised by Artificial Intelligence: the self-driving car dilemma, or in this particular case, a full range of self-driving car dilemmas. The objective of the survey is to provide policymakers and car manufacturers with socially acceptable moral rules. MME has recorded over 40 million decisions in ten languages, and in 233 countries on a dedicated platform online provided by the MIT. Sessions were each composed of 13 scenarios: one entirely chosen at random and the other 12 sampled from a set of approximatively 26 million possibilities. In each session two dilemmas specifically focused on the importance of gender, age, physical fitness, and social status in the decision-making process. At first sight, these dilemmas are not fundamentally different from those already discussed in the Trolley problem originally presented by Philippa Foot in 1967 and the numerous versions it has produced since. In both cases, we are presented with a (very unlikely) fictional case in which we are to choose amongst two options, each one involving at least the death of one person. In both cases, each questionnaire is accompanied by a diagram, showing the spatial layout of the forthcoming tragedy. But there stops the similarity between these cases. Whilst the Moral Machine Experiment (MME) attempts to build (consequentialist) moral rules out of our intuitions, the Trolley Problem was initially conceived as an illustration of the limits of consequentialism. More importantly, perhaps, MME deeply undermines moral realism, which Philippa Foot, amongst many others, tried to defend. Many points, however, seem to indicate that for their authors, like a great numbers of their readers, these experiments belong to the same category. Most scholars have ceased to see these thought experiments as means to challenge moral theories but prefer seeing them as a way to solve them. This raises, however, a number of theoretical and methodological issues that I propose to discuss. This paper argues, in particular, that moral rules are no more reducible to social preferences than they are to biological laws, and that ethical issues cannot reasonably been treated independently of each other, and maybe more importantly, outside of a sound ethical and meta-ethical framework.
  
   

• Time slot: 10h30-11h30

Three Arguments against Paternalism

• Julian Reiss (Durham University)
   
• Abstract: An agent A acts paternalistically towards a patient P if and only if A implements an interference with P's liberty or autonomy, Z, against P's will or without P's knowledge, such that Z promotes P's well-being, goals, or interests. I maintain that A's doing Z is justified at best when three necessary (but not sufficient) conditions are met:

1. A knows what constitutes P's well-being or what his goals or interests are
2. A knows that Z promotes P's well-being, goals, or interests
3. Of all available actions that might promote P's well-being, goals, or interests, Z is the action that least interfere with P's liberty or autonomy
    
   I argue in this paper that for governments deciding about the implementation of possibly welfare-enhancing policies, typically, conditions 1-3 are not met.

• Time slot: 11h45-12h45

When Irrelevant Alternatives Do Matter. The Effect of Focusing on Loan Decisions

• Barna Bako (Corvinus School of Budapest), Gabor Neszveda (Tilburg University), Linda Dezsõ (University of Vienna)
  
   
• Abstract: in this paper, we investigate some implications of recent results about salience on loan decisions. Using the framework of focus-weighted utility, we show that consumers might take out loans even when that yield them negative utility. We claim, however, that consumers are more prudent in their decisions and might be less likely to take out such loans when the usual fixed- and increasing-instalment plans are coupled with an equivalent decreasing-instalment option. We argue that harmful loan consumption, especially in the case of loans with increasing-instalments (e.g. alternative mortgage loans), could be decreased if a policy would prescribe presentation of loan repayment schedules in a way that employs this effect. Moreover, using the model of focus weighted utility we give a possible explanation for the unpopularity of decreasing instalment plans, the success of increasing-instalment plans and their higher default rate observed during the recent financial crisis. 
  
   
• Time slot: 14h00-15h00

Self-Control Failures, as judged by themselves

• Liam Delaney (University College Dublin) and Leonhard Lades (University College Dublin)
  
   
• Abstract: the existence of self-control failures is often used to legitimize public policy interventions. The argument is that reducing self-control failures can make people better off, as judged by themselves. However, there is only scarce evidence on the frequency and welfare costs of self-control failures. This paper presents a survey method that allows us to measure self-control failures in everyday life and to identify their welfare costs in terms of associations with experienced subjective well-being. We present novel survey evidence using this method and discuss its implications for behavioral welfare economics and public policy making.
  
   
• Time slot: 15h00-16h00

Did Faust freely sign? The ethics of choosing under influence

• Guilhem Lecouteux (Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS, GREDEG)
  
   
• Abstract: libertarian paternalism considers that individuals fail to satisfy their preferences due to various psychological biases, and call upon choice architects to nudge individuals so as to steer their behaviour into the ‘right’ direction, as judged by themselves. By identifying individuals’ biases as the only source of their ‘mistakes’, libertarian paternalism overlooks the various social influences that shape people’s preferences and behaviours (e.g. marketing or poverty leading to obesity). This seriously distorts how we design behavioural public policies, since the only objective is to correct ex post individual deviant behaviours, rather than dealing with the ex ante causes of those behaviours.
  
   
• Time slot: 16h30-17h30