Experimental Research by Avner Ben-Ner and Louis Putterman
Avner Ben-Ner (Ph.D. Economics, SUNY-Stony Brook), Professor and Director of the Industrial Relations Center, Carlson School of Management,
Their first experiments are written up in two papers:(1) “Reciprocity in a Two Part Dictator Game,” by Avner Ben-Ner, Louis Putterman, Dan Magan and Fanmin Kong, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.53: 333-52, 2004, and (2) “Share and Share Alike? Intelligence, Socialization, Personality, and Gender-Pairing as Determinants of Giving,” with Avner Ben-Ner, Fanmin Kong and Louis Putterman, Journal of Economic Psychology 25: 581-9, 2004.
Between 2004 and 2006, with funding from the Russell Sage Foundation, they conducted a series of experiments on the determinants of trusting and trustworthiness, using variants of the trust or investment game devised by Berg, Dickhaut and McCabe. Their aim is to investigate the impact on trusting and trustworthiness of (a) opportunities to communicate either numerical offers or text messages or both, (b) opportunities to enter into costly contracts with and without costly fines for non-fulfillment of terms, (c) information about the identity of interaction partners, and (d) personal characteristics. Two papers from this project, as yet unpublished, are:
Ben-Ner and Putterman, “Trust, Communication, and Contracts: An Experiment.”
Ben-Ner, Putterman and Ting Ren, “Lavish Returns on Cheap Talk: Non-binding Communication in a Trust Experiment”(Brown University Department of Economics Working Paper 2007-15, Sept. 10, 2007).
Ben-Ner and Putterman co-edited the book Economics, Values and Organization (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Their article “On Some Implications of Evolutionary Psychology for the Study of Preferences and Institutions,” appeared in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization in 2000. Their article “Trusting and Trustworthiness,” appeared in Boston University Law Review 81 (3): 523-551, 2001, and “Trust in the New Economy,” appears in Derek C. Jones, ed., Handbook of Economics in the Electronic Age. Academic Press, 2003. Their article “Values Matter” appears in World Economics, vol. 1 number 1, January 2000.
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