The Distribution of Revealed Preferences Under Social Pressure

I report the results of an experiment designed to investigate the influence of noncredible communications and group affiliation on auditors' formation of self-serving bias. I find that manager-subjects use noncredible communications to induce auditors to develop an unwarranted trust of managers (i.e., a biased judgment). However, the bias is neutralized when auditor-subjects belong to groups that create social pressure to conform to group norms. Thus, my finding calls into question the Bazerman et al. (1997) conclusion that auditors cannot conduct impartial audits due to self-serving biases resulting from repeated interactions between auditors and their clients.

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Making Behavioralism Work

10.1093/oso/9780190698577.003.0004 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Adrian Kuenzler

Keyword(s):

Intellectual Property ◽

Consumer Preferences ◽

Psychological Research ◽

Revealed Preferences ◽

Consumer Sovereignty ◽

Bright Line ◽

Production And Distribution ◽

External Incentives ◽

The Universe

This chapter turns to the restoration of consumer sovereignty. It revisits the three recurrent principles set out in Chapter 1 and argues that antitrust and intellectual property laws must understand consumers in their full socially embedded complexity to promote progress. Only in this way can analysts respect, rather than suppress, consumer preferences that evince concern for less proprietary forms of production and distribution in a marketplace which is heavily fixated on consumerism and passive consumption. It points to a number of ingenious recent studies from the cognitive psychological research that demonstrate that revealed preferences and external incentives have been offered as bright line rules for directing the consumer’s attention primarily (and exclusively) to conventional manufacturing and distribution techniques, but that such physical and economic processes scarcely exhaust the universe of choices about which consumers express strong interest.

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Social Pressure in Networks Induces Public Good Provision

Games ◽

10.3390/g12010004 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 (1) ◽

pp. 4

Author(s):

David Jimenez-Gomez

Keyword(s):

Public Good ◽

Small Group ◽

Dynamic Model ◽

Network Topology ◽

Social Pressure ◽

Public Good Provision ◽

Public Good Game ◽

The Public ◽

Best Response ◽

Good Provision

I develop a dynamic model with forward looking agents, and show that social pressure is effective in generating provision in a public good game: after a small group of agents start contributing to the public good, other agents decide to contribute as well due to a fear of being punished, and this generates contagion in the network. In contrast to earlier models in the literature, contagion happens fast, as part of the best response of fully rational individuals. The network topology has implications for whether contagion starts and the extent to which it spreads. I find conditions under which an agent decides to be the first to contribute in order to generate contagion in the network, as well as conditions for contribution due to a self-fulfilling fear of social pressure.

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