The Dean's Award for Outstanding Dissertation Thesis was awarded in September to Katarína Čellárová, a graduate of doctoral studies at ECON MUNI and an experimental economist. In her doctoral research she found, among other things, that exploitation is less common when people are aware that they may switch roles with the victim in the future. It also revealed that winners who sacrificed more to win felt they deserved a better reward.
Participants in the experiment are divided into pairs and have the opportunity to destroy part of their partner's property without personal gain. The aim is to uncover motivations for destructive behaviour such as reciprocity, aversion to inequality or pleasure in destruction. In my work I used a multi-phase design with different scenarios to distinguish motivations and I also considered participants' expectations of others' behaviour.
My co-authors and I have found that the main motivation for destroying the property of other people is reciprocity. Most of the participants in the experiment destroyed part of their partner's assets only if they expected that the other person would do the same. This result shows that the decision to act destructively is often reactive and not antisocial as it is usually interpreted in previous studies.
We found that exploitation is less frequent when there is a possibility that the victim and the witness will switch roles in the future. Also, a shared social identity between actors reduces the rate of exploitation. The results suggest that awareness of being a victim or shared group membership can reinforce moral norms and reduce exploitative behaviour.
The dictator game is used to determine distributive preferences where one player receives money and decides whether to send some of it to another player or not. Despite the fact that a rational individual has no reason to share, past studies document that giving nothing to another person is perceived negatively. We used this fact to investigate whether third parties are willing to pay to punish the behaviour they do not like. We therefore modified the game to make even more extreme the money transfers that the "dictator" or player distributing the money can make. We then measured and manipulated various social norms and observed their influence on third-party decisions about whether to punish different kinds of dictator behaviour.
We found that when participants assumed that the dictator usually sent more money, they punished small transfers more than those who thought the dictator will usually send just little. We were surprised that the amount participants considered socially acceptable did not play a role in the sentencing decision. This is again out of line with the conclusions of previous studies that, however, took less variables into account.
In this paper I explored why people who compete for power tend to allocate less resources to others. As in the real world we only see what winners do, I designed an experiment that investigated the behaviour of losers in a situation where they would win, while continuously changing whether or not the participants have to invest in the competition. By doing this, I was able to differentiate between two factors that may play a role: first, the feeling that participants "deserve" the resources, and second, that more selfish people choose to position themselves as winners. I show in my study that competition changes how willing people are to share. Those who had to sacrifice more resources to win share less with others.
All my studies examine the factors that influence exploitation and redistribution of resources and the ways to stop these processes. I applied the method of economic experimentation in all instances, which makes it possible to observe people's behaviour that may be hidden in everyday life and to collect data that are not usually available.
The results are applicable as the basis of the design of policies and interventions aimed at reducing exploitation and abuse of power. The findings of the last study, for example, can be used as an argument for regulating how much money candidates for political office can spend on their campaigns, so that once in office they do not feel that taking more for themselves is justified.
Dr Katarína Čellárová is an assistant professor and postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Law, Charles University. As part of the Department of Economics and Empirical Legal Studies, she is involved in the design of experimental studies testing how people respond to different institutional settings. She is also a member of the team of the project "Human-Machine Transactions: Behavioural Micro-foundations and Legal Implications", which explores the implications of AI on human decision-making, interactions and legal frameworks. She completed her doctoral studies at ECON MUNI.
In some parts of the city, it can be faster to ride a shared bike than to drive or take public transport. In Brno, these are areas like Nová Zbrojovka or Spielberg Office, where traffic is heavy and public transport accessibility is poor. Dr Ondřej Špetík from ECON MUNI talks about how Brno residents use the bike-sharing system in the following interview.
The best researchers from ECON MUNI received the Dean's Awards on Monday, 23 September. The ceremony took place at the assembly of the academic community.
