Driving Forces Behind Informal Sanctions

This paper investigates the driving forces behind informal sanctions in cooperation games and the extent to which theories of fairness and reciprocity capture these forces. We find that cooperators' punishment is almost exclusively targeted toward the defectors, but the latter also impose a considerable amount of spiteful punishment on the cooperators. However, spiteful punishment vanishes if the punishers can no longer affect the payoff differences between themselves and the punished individual, whereas the cooperators even increase the resources devoted to punishment in this case. Our data also discriminate between different fairness principles. Fairness theories that are based on the assumption that players compare their own payoff to the group's average or the group's total payoff cannot explain the fact that cooperators target their punishment at the defectors. Fairness theories that assume that players aim to minimize payoff inequalities cannot explain the fact that cooperators punish defectors even if payoff inequalities cannot be reduced. Therefore, retaliation, i.e., the desire to harm those who committed unfair acts, seems to be the most important motive behind fairness‐driven informal sanctions.     

Infant vocalizations elicit simplified speech in childcare

Infant babbling has an important social function in promoting early language development by attracting caregiver attention and prompting parents' contingent, simplified speech, which is more learnable for infants. Here, we demonstrate that prelinguistic infant vocalizations also create learning opportunities for infants in childcare settings by eliciting simplified and more learnable linguistic information during teacher-infant interactions. We compared the rates and complexity of contingent and non-contingent verbal interactions of 34 childcare teachers during a one-on-one free play interaction with a familiar infant under their care (M = 12.6 months old). As compared to non-contingent utterances, teachers' contingent utterances included fewer unique words, a higher proportion of single-word responses, and a shorter mean length of utterances. Teachers did not change their response length based on infants' syllable type and were equally likely to respond to vowels and consonant-vowel vocalizations. Sources of individual differences in the simplification effect related to infant behaviors and teacher characteristics are discussed. The results parallel previous findings demonstrating the simplification effect in parent-infant interactions. That teachers also show this simplification effect when responding to infant vocalizations suggests the power of infant prelinguistic vocalizations for organizing caregiver attention in various settings to elicit simplified, learnable language.     

Relational Contracts and the Nature of Market Interactions

We provide evidence that long‐term relationships between trading parties emerge endogenously in the absence of third party enforcement of contracts and are associated with a fundamental change in the nature of market interactions. Without third party enforcement, the vast majority of trades are initiated with private offers and the parties share the gains from trade equally. Low effort or bad quality is penalized by the termination of the relationship, wielding a powerful effect on contract enforcement. Successful long‐term relations exhibit generous rent sharing and high effort (quality) from the very beginning of the relationship. In the absence of third‐party enforcement, markets resemble a collection of bilateral trading islands rather than a competitive market. If contracts are third party enforceable, rent sharing and long‐term relations are absent and the vast majority of trades are initiated with public offers. Most trades take place in one‐shot transactions and the contracting parties are indifferent with regard to the identity of their trading partner.     

Resilience: A Review Using a Grounded Integrated Occupational Approach

Resilience, the ability to adapt to adversity and endure job demands, is growing in prominence in the management literature with limited regard to occupational influences. Often examined at the individual level with fragmented conceptualizations, it can be a trait, capacity, or a process. We conduct a review of (1) management studies and (2) content from O*NET for 11 occupations and disciplinary studies taking a grounded approach to synthesize themes to develop an integrated occupational resilience framework. Our review suggests that resilience is individually and occupationally determined as part of a multi-level system. Our review shows that specific occupational tasks and contextual demands imply different connotations of what exactly “resilience” means and how contexts may constrain or foster resiliency. Occupational resilience involves (1) multiple conceptual strands related to accessing resources (trait, capacity, and processes); (2) positive and negative triggers that are occupationally distinguished; (3) different resilience types (cognitive, emotional, and physical) that vary in need, breadth, and importance across occupations; (4) a dynamic phenomenon that occurs within and across career stages; (5) both content-general, and job-specific occupational tensions; and (6) work and nonwork domains. Multi-level occupational-specific and comparative studies, adaptive performance and risk taking across the work–nonwork interface are highlighted areas for future research.     

An alternative parameterization of Bayesian logistic hierarchical models for mixed treatment comparisons

Mixed treatment comparison (MTC) models rely on estimates of relative effectiveness from randomized clinical trials so as to respect randomization across treatment arms. This approach could potentially be simplified by an alternative parameterization of the way effectiveness is modeled. We introduce a treatment‐based parameterization of the MTC model that estimates outcomes on both the study and treatment levels. We compare the proposed model to the commonly used MTC models using a simulation study as well as three randomized clinical trial datasets from published systematic reviews comparing (i) treatments on bleeding after cirrhosis, (ii) the impact of antihypertensive drugs in diabetes mellitus, and (iii) smoking cessation strategies. The simulation results suggest similar or sometimes better performance of the treatment‐based MTC model. Moreover, from the real data analyses, little differences were observed on the inference extracted from both models. Overall, our proposed MTC approach performed as good, or better, than the commonly applied indirect and MTC models and is simpler, fast, and easier to implement in standard statistical software. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

La Familia - How Trust Towards Family Decreases Female Labor Force Participation

This paper investigates whether comprehensive trust towards immediate family members leads to a decrease in female labor force participation in Sub Saharan African countries. Using three recent waves, third, fourth and fifth rounds of the Afrobarometer survey data allows us to capture the willingness to participate in the labor market as well as the level of trust individuals have towards their family members. We find that a high amount of trust significantly decreases labor force participation vary in range from minimum of 7 percent to 13 percent at maximum in our probit estimations. Moreover, the statistical as well as economic effects are significantly stronger for females than the effect for males. Our main contribution to the emerging economies literature in informal institutions is that we are able to show how different cultural traits such as family ties lead to different choices in terms of participation in the labor market.     

JEEA‐FBBVA Lecture 2012: USE AND ABUSE OF AUTHORITY: A BEHAVIORAL FOUNDATION OF THE EMPLOYMENT RELATION

Employment contracts give a principal the authority to decide flexibly which task his agent should execute. However, there is a tradeoff, first pointed out by Simon (1951, Econometrica, 19, 293–302), between flexibility and employer moral hazard. An employment contract allows the principal to adjust the task quickly to the realization of the state of the world, but he may also abuse this flexibility to exploit the agent. We capture this tradeoff in an experimental design and show that principals exhibit a strong preference for the employment contract. However, selfish principals exploit agents in one‐shot interactions, inducing the latter to resist entering into employment contracts. This resistance to employment contracts vanishes if fairness preferences in combination with reputation opportunities keep principals from abusing their power, leading to the widespread, endogenous formation of efficient long‐run employment relations. Our results inform the theory of the firm by showing how behavioral forces shape an important transaction cost of integration—the abuse of authority—and by providing an empirical basis for assessing differences between the Marxian and the Coasian view of the firm, as well as Alchian and Demsetz's (1972, American Economic Review, 62, 777–795) critique of the Coasian approach.