SGER: NSNX and Social Choice Experiments

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Over the past quarter-century and more, social choice experiments have studied how people choose between what can be earned by each acting in pure self-interest as against what would be jointly earned if all could commit themselves to act in their common interest. This proposal grows out of a pilot project that produced striking early results from fresh analysis of archived data from several prominent sets of experiments, using an unconventional extension of standard rational actor theory to allow for social motivation ("nsnx"), and giving close attention to what has been learned in recent decades about the cognitive cuing of choices. Coincidentally (since the proposal was submitted) the Nobel prize for Economics this year has been shared between Vernon Smith, who has pioneered in the use of rational choice theory in experimental work and Daniel Kahneman who (with Amos Tversky) pioneered in the application of cognitive concerns to economics. The project builds on that work. Results of several strong tests for "nsnx" effects have shown effects of size and robustness beyond what has often been seen in the social sciences. A downloadable "template" allows other researchers to run the tests on data of their own choice. The work aims at gaining insight from controlled experimental conditions that can be applied to socially urgent problems (from voluntarism at home to terrorism and ethnic conflict aboard) that turn heavily on the ability of groups to sustain or disrupt cooperation under conditions where binding agreements and third-party enforcement are difficult. This is arguably the most fundamental issue of the social sciences.