Papers by Giorgio Coricelli
The effect of ex-post information in choice under ambiguity
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, Jan 19, 2021
International audienc
Journal of Economic Psychology, Feb 1, 2014
Shaming can be either of two types, shaming that becomes stigmatization of the offender and favor... more Shaming can be either of two types, shaming that becomes stigmatization of the offender and favors his exclusion from the community, or shaming that is followed by forgiveness and reintegration of the deviant. Here we test experimentally these aspects of shaming theory with a repeated tax-payment game, in which the shaming ''ritual'' consisted of displaying the evader's picture in addition to charging monetary sanctions. Results show that when cheating is made public and the contravener is not successively reintegrated, the total amount of cheating is significantly increased compared to when cheating is made public but publicity is immediately followed by reintegration. The former condition is associated with more intense negative emotions related to cheating. This suggests that the employment of a social shaming mechanism may be an effective, albeit very sensitive, tool in the hands of policy makers. Ó 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 'Cultural commitments to shaming are the key to controlling all types of crime. However, for all types of crime, shaming runs the risk of counterproductivity when it shades into stigmatization'.
Judgment and Decision Making
In social contexts, we refer to strategic sophistication as the ability to adapt our own behavior... more In social contexts, we refer to strategic sophistication as the ability to adapt our own behavior based on the possible actions of others. In the current study, we explore the role of other-oriented attention and cognitive reflection in explaining heterogeneity in strategic sophistication. In two eye-tracking experiments, we registered eye movements of participants while playing matrix games of increasing relational complexity (2x2 and 3x3 matrices), and we analyzed individual gaze patterns to reveal the ongoing mechanisms of integration of own and others’ incentives in the current game representation. Moreover, participants completed the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), in addition to alternative measures of cognitive ability. In both classes of games, higher cognitive reflection levels specifically predict the ability to incorporate the counterpart’s incentives in the current model of the game, as well as higher levels of strategic sophistication. Conversely, players exhibiting lo...
The process of choice in games
Handbook of Experimental Game Theory, 2020
Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of the institute. Research d... more Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of the institute. Research disseminated by IZA may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit company supported by Deutsche Post World Net. The center is associated with the University of Bonn
The effect of ex-post information in choice under ambiguity
Financial Education and Risk Literacy, 2021
International audienc
This chapter is about the application of methods from psychophysics to the investigation of exper... more This chapter is about the application of methods from psychophysics to the investigation of experimental game theory. We show how methods from psychophysics including the analysis of reaction time, mouse-lab and eye-tracking, can be used to improve our understanding of experimental game theory. The main goal of this chapter is to provide a balanced view of the possibilities of the process tracing approach, which is the investigation of the processes underlying choice. In addition, this chapter aims to provide practical understanding of the methods to enable the reader to evaluate this fast-growing literature. A secondary goal is to provide an introduction for readers interested in designing their own psychophysics experiments. Response Time and Strategic Choice The study of response times (RTs) has a long history in experimental psychology going back to Donders (1868) who was interested in measuring the time that a particular hypothetical mental stage involved in a task can take. Th...
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2007
Les cahiers de la série scientifique (CS) visent à rendre accessibles des résultats de recherche ... more Les cahiers de la série scientifique (CS) visent à rendre accessibles des résultats de recherche effectuée au CIRANO afin de susciter échanges et commentaires. Ces cahiers sont écrits dans le style des publications scientifiques. Les idées et les opinions émises sont sous l'unique responsabilité des auteurs et ne représentent pas nécessairement les positions du CIRANO ou de ses partenaires. This paper presents research carried out at CIRANO and aims at encouraging discussion and comment. The observations and viewpoints expressed are the sole responsibility of the authors. They do not necessarily represent positions of CIRANO or its partners.
This paper presents an experimental analysis of people’s behavior in situations involving both po... more This paper presents an experimental analysis of people’s behavior in situations involving both positive and negative reciprocity. The experiment implements sequences of two types of extensive form games called Punishment games and Trust games. The contemporaneous use of these two types of games allows us to define an ideal framework for understanding the basic elements of reciprocal behavior. Results show that the level of trust and punishment are consistent with the view that emotions are involved.
Respuestas desde el cuerpo: una introducción a la neuroeconomía
Scientific Reports, 2021
Many types of social interaction require the ability to anticipate others' behavior, which is... more Many types of social interaction require the ability to anticipate others' behavior, which is commonly referred to as strategic sophistication. In this context, observational learning can represent a decisive tool for behavioral adaptation. However, little is known on whether and when individuals learn from observation in interactive settings. In the current study, 321 participants played one-shot interactive games and, at a given time along the experiment, they could observe the choices of an overtly efficient player. This social feedback could be provided before or after the participant’s choice in each game. Results reveal that players with a sufficient level of strategic skills increased their level of sophistication only when the social feedback was provided after their choices, whereas they relied on blind imitation when they received feedback before their decision. Conversely, less sophisticated players did not increase their level of sophistication, regardless of the typ...
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2019
In our everyday life, we often need to anticipate the potential occurrence of events and their co... more In our everyday life, we often need to anticipate the potential occurrence of events and their consequences. In this context, the way we represent contingencies can determine our ability to adapt to the environment. However, it is not clear how agents encode and organize available knowledge about the future to react to possible states of the world. In the present study, we investigated the process of contingency representation with three eye-tracking experiments. In Experiment 1, we introduced a novel relational-inference task in which participants had to learn and represent conditional rules regulating the occurrence of interdependent future events. A cluster analysis on early gaze data revealed the existence of 2 distinct types of encoders. A group of (sophisticated) participants built exhaustive contingency models that explicitly linked states with each of their potential consequences. Another group of (unsophisticated) participants simply learned binary conditional rules without exploring the underlying relational complexity. Analyses of individual cognitive measures revealed that cognitive reflection is associated with the emergence of either sophisticated or unsophisticated representation behavior. In Experiment 2, we observed that unsophisticated participants switched toward the sophisticated strategy after having received information about its existence, suggesting that representation behavior was modulated by strategy generation mechanisms. In Experiment 3, we showed that the heterogeneity in representation strategy emerges also in conditional reasoning with verbal sequences, indicating the existence of a general disposition in building either sophisticated or unsophisticated models of contingencies.
Journal of the Economic Science Association, 2019
We run an eye-tracking experiment to investigate whether players change their gaze patterns and c... more We run an eye-tracking experiment to investigate whether players change their gaze patterns and choices after they experience alternative models of choice in one-shot games. In phase 1 and 3, participants play 2 × 2 matrix games with a human counterpart; in phase 2, they apply specific decision rules while playing with a computer with known behavior. We classify participants in types based on their gaze patterns in phase 1 and explore attentional shifts in phase 3, after players were exposed to the alternative decision rules. Results show that less sophisticated players, who focus mainly on their own payoffs, change their gaze patterns towards the evaluation of others' incentives in phase 3. This attentional shift predicts an increase in equilibrium responses in relevant classes of games. Conversely, cooperative players do not change their visual analysis. Our results shed new light on theories of bounded rationality and on theories of social preferences.
Scientific Reports, 2018
Studies in cultural evolution have uncovered many types of social learning strategies that are ad... more Studies in cultural evolution have uncovered many types of social learning strategies that are adaptive in certain environments. The efficiency of these strategies also depends on the individual characteristics of both the observer and the demonstrator. We investigate the relationship between intelligence and the ways social and individual information is utilised to make decisions in an uncertain environment. We measure fluid intelligence and study experimentally how individuals learn from observing the choices of a demonstrator in a 2-armed bandit problem with changing probabilities of a reward. Participants observe a demonstrator with high or low fluid intelligence. In some treatments they are aware of the intelligence score of the demonstrator and in others they are not. Low fluid intelligence individuals imitate the demonstrator more when her fluid intelligence is known than when it is not. Conversely, individuals with high fluid intelligence adjust their use of social informati...
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2019
Individuals learn by comparing the outcome of chosen and unchosen actions. A negative counterfact... more Individuals learn by comparing the outcome of chosen and unchosen actions. A negative counterfactual value signal is generated when this comparison is unfavorable. This can happen in private as well as in social settings—where the foregone outcome results from the choice of another person. We hypothesized that, despite sharing similar features such as supporting learning, these two counterfactual signals might implicate distinct brain networks. We conducted a neuropsychological study on the role of private and social counterfactual value signals in risky decision-making. Patients with lesions in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), lesion controls, and healthy controls repeatedly chose between lotteries. In private trials, participants could observe the outcomes of their choices and the outcomes of the unselected lotteries. In social trials, participants could also see the other player's choices and outcome. At the time of outcome, vmPFC patients were insensitive to priva...
Games and Economic Behavior, 2018
We use eye-tracking to identify possible causes of inconsistency between choices and beliefs in g... more We use eye-tracking to identify possible causes of inconsistency between choices and beliefs in games. Participants play a series of two-player 3 × 3 one-shot games (choice task) and state their beliefs about which actions they expect their counterpart to play (belief elicitation task). We use a model-based clustering method to group participants according to the pattern of visual analysis they use to make their decisions in the two tasks. We find that heterogeneity in the lookup patterns reflects the adoption of different models of choice. Our results suggest that there are two main reasons why participants do not best respond to their beliefs in games. First, many of them take into account the incentives of the counterpart when stating their beliefs, but not when choosing their actions. Second, some participants have other-regarding preferences and attempt to find a cooperative solution of the game.
Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2018
In social interactions, strategic uncertainty arises when the outcome of one's choice depends... more In social interactions, strategic uncertainty arises when the outcome of one's choice depends on the choices of others. An important question is whether strategic uncertainty can be resolved by assessing subjective probabilities to the counterparts' behavior, as if playing against nature, and thus transforming the strategic interaction into a risky (individual) situation. By means of functional magnetic resonance imaging with human participants we tested the hypothesis that choices under strategic uncertainty are supported by the neural circuits mediating choices under individual risk and deliberation in social settings (i.e. strategic thinking). Participants were confronted with risky lotteries and two types of coordination games requiring different degrees of strategic thinking of the kind 'I think that you think that I think etc.' We found that the brain network mediating risk during lotteries (anterior insula, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and parietal cortex) is...
Scientific reports, Jan 23, 2018
Uncertainty in the form of risk or ambiguity can arise from the interaction with nature and other... more Uncertainty in the form of risk or ambiguity can arise from the interaction with nature and other players, while strategic uncertainty arises only in interactions with others. Here, we systematically compare binary decisions between a safe option and a potentially higher paying but uncertain option in four experimental conditions with the same potential monetary outcomes: coordination vs. anti coordination games, as well as risky and ambiguous lotteries. In each condition, we progressively increase the value of the safe option and measure subjects' certainty equivalents (i.e., the specific safe payoff-threshold that makes a subject indifferent between the two options). We find that anti-coordination games and ambiguous lotteries elicit equally high aversion to uncertainty, relative to the other domains. In spite of this similarity, we find that subjects alternate between the safe and uncertain options much more frequently, thus displaying higher entropy, under anti-coordination ...
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017
We study experimentally how individuals learn from observing the choices of others in a nonstatio... more We study experimentally how individuals learn from observing the choices of others in a nonstationary stochastic environment. The imitation choices of participants with low score in an intelligence test are driven solely by the value of imitation. High intelligence score participants, in addition, use choices of others to better understand the environment. They imitate more when other's choices are stable, which makes them more optimal than low score participants. The knowledge that the observed other has high intelligence score affects behavior of only low score participants. Overall, intelligence predicts the usage of simple or sophisticated observational learning strategy.
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 2016
The unfavorable comparison between the obtained and expected outcomes of our choices may elicit d... more The unfavorable comparison between the obtained and expected outcomes of our choices may elicit disappointment. When the comparison is made with the outcome of alternative actions, emotions like regret can serve as a learning signal. Previous work showed that both anticipated disappointment and regret influence decisions. In addition, experienced regret is associated with higher emotional responses than disappointment. Yet it is not clear whether this amplification is due to additive effects of disappointment and regret when the outcomes of alternative actions are available, or whether it reflects the learning feature of regret signals. In this perspective, we used eye‐tracking to measure the visual pattern of information acquisition in a probabilistic lottery task. In the partial feedback condition, only the outcome of the chosen lottery was revealed, while in the complete feedback condition, participants could compare their outcome with that of the non‐chosen lottery, giving them ...
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Papers by Giorgio Coricelli