Business Drinking: Evidence from A Lab-in-the-Field Experiment

Although alcohol consumption is an important component of business negotiations across many cultures, this behavior remains unmodeled. Here, we develop a theory that combines guilt-aversion with a canonical alcohol myopia framework. Our GAAM (guilt aversion and alcohol myopia) model predicts that intoxication increases promise-making, but has no effect on promise-breaking. We test these predictions using a prisoner’s dilemma game with pre-play communication in a lab-in-the-field experiment. Among males, we find behavior consistent with predictions. We do not observe intoxication to impact female promise-making or promise-breaking behaviors, consistent with previous empirical findings that females are relatively insensitive to alcohol-induced myopia.