{"title":"Inequality, life expectancy, and the alienation effect: Insights from a real-effort experiment on the intragenerational redistribution puzzle","authors":"Tim Krieger , Christine Meemann , Stefan Traub","doi":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107149","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107149","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In most OECD countries, pension reform policy has decreased the level of <em>intra</em>generational redistribution in the public pension system over the last three decades, that is, redistribution among members of the same generation with high and low pension entitlements. This trend has occurred despite heterogeneity in life expectancy linked to socioeconomic status having a regressive impact on outcomes. We propose a model that explains this empirical puzzle through the ‘alienation’ of society from low-income earners and successfully test the model in a real-effort experiment.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48409,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","volume":"237 ","pages":"Article 107149"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144711792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When does coordination require centralization? The roles of organizational inertia and diversity","authors":"Ming Li , Hitoshi Sadakane","doi":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107114","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107114","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We consider a multidivisional organization’s choice between a decentralized structure and a centralized one. Each division has its own private information and can fully commit to a communication rule. We show that the need for coordination would favor centralization due to the optimality of the decisions. However, if each division has a bias towards inertia, decentralization may be beneficial because the division managers may be unwilling to disclose information to the headquarters due to the conflict of interest caused by the divisions’ inertia biases. We find that decentralization dominates centralization in a larger set of environments in a diverse organization than in a homogeneous organization.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48409,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","volume":"237 ","pages":"Article 107114"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144711791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cooperative and competitive reasoning: From games to revolutions","authors":"David Jimenez-Gomez","doi":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107141","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107141","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>I introduce a novel solution concept, team level-<span><math><mi>k</mi></math></span>, in games of incomplete information. The model generalizes level-<span><math><mi>k</mi></math></span> and team reasoning models, and provides a unified explanation for several important phenomena in social dilemmas. In Rubinstein’s Email Game, players successfully coordinate upon receiving sufficient messages. In coordination games, the model explains several experimental facts that cannot be accounted for by global games, particularly the fact that there is greater coordination between people with public rather than private information, which has important policy implications. A generalization of the model relaxes the epistemic requirements for cooperative behavior, which I apply to study collective action and revolutions. Although the government attempts to manipulate citizen perceptions of the fundamentals, they might be able to coordinate if the fundamentals are sufficiently in their favor.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48409,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","volume":"237 ","pages":"Article 107141"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144711793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Incentive pay, managerial skills and span of control","authors":"Filippo Belloc , Stefano Dughera , Fabio Landini","doi":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107151","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107151","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The use of incentive pay to elicit worker effort is a hallmark of agency theory. Although an extensive literature has investigated the effects of these incentives on both firm and worker performance, less attention has been paid to their heterogeneous use across firms. We document that incentive contracts are more likely adopted in firms with better educated managers and with hierarchies where the span of control is larger. This result is robust to different specification models that account for selectivity effects, measurement errors, heterogeneity in the type of incentive pay and the incidence of teamwork. We rationalize this empirical evidence through a simple principal-(multi)-agent model where a manager optimally allocates her time across two tasks: coordination and supervision. The model hinges on two assumptions: first, the marginal benefit of coordination is assumed increasing in the managers’ skills. Second, the marginal benefit of supervision is assumed decreasing in the manager’s span of control. With these ingredients the model suggests that managers who are more skilled and having larger span of control should focus more on coordination and less on supervision, and thus, pay higher bonuses to elicit labour effort. Taken together, these results help to extend the debate about the drivers of incentive pay beyond standard worker and industry-level characteristics, and to focus more explicitly on firm and manager features instead.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48409,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","volume":"237 ","pages":"Article 107151"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144711794","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A comprehensive assessment of provider payment reform: Insights from China","authors":"Xiaoyan Lei , Henry Y. Mak , Julie Shi , Yuqi Ta","doi":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107160","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107160","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper develops a context-specific model to evaluate China's transition from a fee-for-service (FFS) system to a prospective payment system (PPS) in healthcare. The model predicts three distinctive pathways. First, reimbursable expenditures are expected to decline, while non-reimbursable expenditures increase. Second, expenditures are predicted to decrease more for historically overused services. Third, the policy is predicted to generate spillover effects, notably an increase in outpatient visits if payment rates exceed a certain threshold. Using a large administrative dataset, we empirically validate these predictions. Reimbursable expenditures declined by 6.7 % after the reform, and non-reimbursable expenditures exhibited an upward trend. The expenditure reduction was entirely driven by a decline in drug costs, with no significant changes in non-drug services such as examinations, treatments, or nursing care. Outpatient visits increased by 19.5 % following the reform. These findings offer valuable insights into the mechanisms and broader implications of healthcare payment reforms in developing countries.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48409,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","volume":"237 ","pages":"Article 107160"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144704187","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How do individuals interact with an AI advisor in strategic reasoning? An experimental study in beauty contest","authors":"Daniela Di Cagno, Lihui Lin","doi":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107159","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107159","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper experimentally investigates how individuals use generative AI to learn and respond in a strategic reasoning contest. An advisor based on level k theory and implemented using ChatGPT is introduced in a four-stage beauty contest experiment. The experiment is designed to explore how AI advisors influence the depth of human reasoning by shaping beliefs, learning, and sophisticated backward induction. Extended cognitive hierarchy models (Camerer et al., 2004) are applied to identify heterogeneous level distribution and more sophisticated thinking. Additionally, the interactions between participants with and without AI advisors are examined. Two key results emerge. First, individuals overestimate AI capabilities when competing against AI-guided participants, which motivates them to employ higher levels of thinking. This observed higher-level behaviour is driven by more sophisticated backward reasoning. Second, improved reasoning under AI guidance shows heterogeneous effects across Cognitive Reflection Test scores, suggesting that AI's impact depends on participants' pre-existing cognitive abilities. Overall, this early research provides insights into the interaction between generative AI and human cognition and reasoning.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48409,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","volume":"237 ","pages":"Article 107159"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144704186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Type-projection, pro-social behavior, and a public good game","authors":"Stefano Barbieri , Marco Serena","doi":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107146","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107146","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>People tend to overestimate how similar others are to themselves. Such projection onto others has broad consequences: we focus on those for pro-social behavior, modeled as a standard public-good contribution game. We find that contributions of sufficiently rich players decrease with projection, because they believe more players are similarly rich and hence overestimate others’ contributions. Conversely, projection increases poor players’ contributions because they believe more players are similarly poor and hence underestimate others’ contributions. In our simple setup, the effect of projection on overall contributions is negative. Our results contribute to the debate on whether the rich are less“generous” than the poor.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48409,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","volume":"237 ","pages":"Article 107146"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144704188","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Open source software as digital platforms to innovate","authors":"Sergio Petralia","doi":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107109","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107109","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article provides evidence that organizations routinely leverage Open Source Software (OSS) infrastructure to innovate. It does so by showing that they tend to synchronize both activities, based on an analysis of the timing of patent filings and OSS submissions using a novel database that links two decades of contributions to 98 of the most popular OSS projects with patent filings in the United States for 1556 organizations. These organizations represent the 26.6 % of all patents granted and the 48 % of all OSS contributions to these projects over the period. The results show that this synchronization has intensified over time, predominantly occurs in projects governed by permissive licensing structures, and extends beyond contributions made to open-source projects where the contributing entity holds ownership or control.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48409,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","volume":"237 ","pages":"Article 107109"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144696418","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Epidemic disasters and corporate green investment","authors":"Tong Fu , Feng He","doi":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107157","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107157","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>While most countries have been adopting strategies to boost economic growth after the coronavirus disease 2019, this paper cautions that we may underestimate the influence of epidemics on sustainable development. With micro evidence from mainland China, we show that the intensity of epidemic disasters during the last feudal period (1644–1895) across prefectures has a long-term effect and reduces corporate green investment in 2009. These findings are robust to geographic, institutional, cultural and unobservable factors, and potential endogeneity bias. We further show that risk-taking propensity mediates the relationship between epidemic intensity and corporate green investment, with robustness to confounding mechanisms. These findings justify that epidemics in hundreds of years ago constrain contemporary corporate green investment in the modern society by breeding a culture of risk-taking. Therefore, this paper suggests to design governmental policies for green investment with historical endowment and cultural context.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48409,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","volume":"237 ","pages":"Article 107157"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144686309","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Alexander W. Cappelen , Varun Gauri , Bertil Tungodden
{"title":"Cooperation creates moral obligations","authors":"Alexander W. Cappelen , Varun Gauri , Bertil Tungodden","doi":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107038","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107038","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In a large-scale economic experiment, conducted with a general population sample from the United States, we show that cooperation is seen to create relationship-specific moral obligations among those who cooperate. Participants in the experiment, acting as third party spectators, transfer significantly more money from a lucky to an unlucky worker when the two workers have cooperated with each other than when they have worked independently. In contrast, cooperation is not seen to make the unlucky worker more deserving of help from workers they have not cooperated with. The effect of cooperation is strongly associated with political affiliation: Republicans attach significantly less importance to cooperation as a source of moral obligations than non-Republicans. The findings shed light on the foundations of redistributive preferences and may help explain the difference in the willingness to help in-group members and out-group members.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48409,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","volume":"237 ","pages":"Article 107038"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144686307","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}