Essays in Behavioural and Experimental EconomicsEmotions, Uncertainty and Cooperation

Résumé

In the first chapter of the dissertation I conduct a laboratory experiment in order to study the effect of incidental sadness and happiness on risky decision making. The analysis reveals that both sadness and happiness are conducive to greater risk aversion with respect to neutral conditions, a result which is consistent with the theory of ego depletion but might be moderated by the risk elicitation task. The second chapter is a meta-analysis of experimental studies on the same topic, so as to explain traditional heterogeneity of outcomes in the field. Among the findings, emotions induce higher risk aversion when a multiple price list à la Holt and Laury (2002) is used in place of stated preferences methods, as well as in case the risk elicitation task is framed as an investment decision instead of an abstract choice. Accordingly, I recommend faithful study replication as preferential path for future investigations. The third chapter offers experimental evidence on the impact of communication on the provision of binary threshold public goods whose quality is uncertain. I find that communication significantly increases public good provision by reducing undercontribution, although massive overcontribution is observed. Therefore, I propose the pursuit of symmetric payoffs within the group as effective explanation and I nally speculate that under uncertainty satisficing is more salient than optimizing.