The ‘3E’ Doctoral Training Unit (DTU), an inter-disciplinary collaboration between LISER and the University of Luxembourg, has launched a new seminar series on the topic of Experiments, Ethics and Economics (3E).
Held every 4th Wednesday of the month, the seminars will gather PhD students as well as senior researchers to discuss innovative investigations of interactions between economic decision making and ethics. The Seminars will highlight new research that will include aspects of decision-making both within the household and in the workplace, and will explore the tension that often exists in these contexts between individual utility maximization and moral or ethical choices.
How to participate?
Registration is not needed for internal participants (please accept the calendar invitation you should have received). External participants can send an email to carla.Martins@liser.lu
First sessions:
26 January, 23 February, 23 March, 27 April 2022
11h00 – 12h30
Location:
Online
First Lectures’s Abstracts
26 January – Ernesto Reuben – Gender biases in job referrals
Job referrals through informal networks are an essential channel for disseminating information about the qualifications of job candidates. As such, they play a crucial role in determining the outcomes of hiring and promotion decisions. In this paper, we study gender biases in the referral process. We investigate this question through an online experiment in which university students are asked to nominate their highest-scoring classmates in either a math or a verbal task. Using administrative data, we reconstruct the students’ co-enrolment network. This allows us to identify who is chosen as well as everyone else who was not. In other words, we can measure the quality of the referrals and the characteristics of candidates who are better but not chosen. We find that participants are more likely to refer men than equally qualified women in the math task but not in the verbal task. This difference is partly explained by gender differences in network structure, i.e., who is linked with whom. However, equally important are gender biases in the referral of known contacts. Thus, debiasing the referral process could substantially increase the share of women being referred.
23 February – Christine Schiltz- Acquiring number concepts: (How) does language contribute?
Cognitive Science and Assessment Institute, University of Luxembourg
A major challenge in math classes is the fact that numerical concepts and symbols are abstract. Especially for young children, this abstractness stands in contrast to their preference of concrete situations and problems. Besides sensori-motor influences on number concepts, the learner’s context and especially his/her language environment plays a critical role in shaping number concepts. Investigations into the relation between language and numerical cognition – in particular the question how multi-lingual persons conceive and process numbers – have lately regained interest. Here I will present and discuss recent findings from studies on the influence of language on numerical cognition in a multilingual context such as Luxembourg (e.g. Van Rinsveld et al., 2015; Van Rinsveld et al., 2017; Poncin et al., 2019).
23 March – Daniele Nosenzo – Equal before the (expressive power of) law? (joint work with Luise Goerges, Tom Lane and Silvia Sonderegger)
Building on findings showing that laws exert a causal effect on social norms, this paper investigates whether this “expressive power of law” differs by gender or race. Using an incentivized vignette experiment, we directly measure social norms relating to actions subject to legal thresholds (e.g., driving above/below speed limit; possession of marijuana above/below legal limit; etc.) and vary the gender and race of the person engaging in the action or of the person affected by the action. Results from an online sample of around 4000 subjects confirm that laws causally influence social norms. However, we find little evidence of a differential effect of the law on norms across gender or race, suggesting that gender and race biases in the legal system are driven by other mechanisms than differences in the expressive power of law.
27 April – Stefan Traub – Evidence on Need-sensitive Giving Behavior: An Experimental Approach to the Acknowledgment of Needs
“We utilize a modified dictator game to analyze whether information about the need of recipients affects dictator giving behavior. Need information is presented as objective information about the recipients’ living circumstances (income, public transfers, and travel time to the lab) and subjective information about the recipients’ self-assessment of their need (« need request »). Classifying dictators according to their conditional transfers yields that 139 of the 246 (57%) dictators are need sensitive. The results show that recipient’s income and travel time affect dictator giving behavior significantly. Furthermore, dictator giving increases when the need request is supported by the income information (« acknowledgment effect »).”
Future sessions to be announced soon.