IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/tin/wpaper/20140063.html

Bidding for Nothing? The Pitfalls of overly Neutral Framing

Author

Listed:
  • Peter Dürsch

    (University of Heidelberg, Germany)

  • Julia Muller

    (Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands.)

Abstract

Neutral framing is a standard tool of experimental economics. However, overly neutral instructions, which lack any contextual clues, can lead to strange behavior. In a contextless second price auction for a meaningless good, a majority of subjects enter positive bids - a case of cognitive experimenter demand effect. Subjects bid positive amounts because this is what they think they are tasked with in the experiment. Adding a second auction that has a context drastically reduces the positive bids in the meaningless first auction by reducing the cognitive experimenter demand effect.

Suggested Citation

  • Peter Dürsch & Julia Muller, 2014. "Bidding for Nothing? The Pitfalls of overly Neutral Framing," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 14-063/I, Tinbergen Institute.
    • Handle: RePEc:tin:wpaper:20140063
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://papers.tinbergen.nl/14063.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Davis, Douglas D. & Holt, Charles a., 1993. "Experimental economics: Methods, problems and promise," Estudios Económicos, El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Económicos, vol. 8(2), pages 179-212.
    2. Engel, Christoph & Rand, David G., 2014. "What does “clean” really mean? The implicit framing of decontextualized experiments," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 122(3), pages 386-389.
    3. Klaus Abbink & Heike Hennig-Schmidt, 2006. "Neutral versus loaded instructions in a bribery experiment," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 9(2), pages 103-121, June.
    4. Duersch, Peter & Müller, Julia, 2015. "Taking punishment into your own hands: An experiment," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 46(C), pages 1-11.
    5. Guth, Werner & Schmittberger, Rolf & Schwarze, Bernd, 1982. "An experimental analysis of ultimatum bargaining," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 3(4), pages 367-388, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Navarro, Noemí & Veszteg, Róbert F., 2020. "On the empirical validity of axioms in unstructured bargaining," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 121(C), pages 117-145.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Bradley J. Ruffle, 2005. "Buyer Countervailing Power: A Survey of Experimental Evidence," Working Papers 0512, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Economics.
    2. Lambsdorff, Johann Graf & Grubiak, Kevin & Werner, Katharina, 2023. "Intrinsic Motivation vs. Corruption? Experimental Evidence on the Performance of Officials," MPRA Paper 118153, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Matteo M. Galizzi & Daniel Navarro-Martinez, 2019. "On the External Validity of Social Preference Games: A Systematic Lab-Field Study," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 65(3), pages 976-1002, March.
    4. Jeffrey P. Carpenter & Stephen Burks & Eric Verhoogen, 2005. "Comparing Students To Workers: The Effects Of Social Framing On Behavior In Distribution Games," Research in Experimental Economics, in: Field Experiments in Economics, pages 261-289, Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
    5. Paul Pecorino & Mark Van Boening, 2004. "An Empirical Analysis of Bargaining with Voluntary Transmission of Private Information," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 33(1), pages 131-156, January.
    6. Samuelson, Larry, 1996. "Bounded rationality and game theory," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 36(Supplemen), pages 17-35.
    7. Jiménez-Jiménez, Francisca & Rodero-Cosano, Javier, 2023. "Conditioning competitive behaviour in experimental Bertrand markets through contextual frames," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 103(C).
    8. Alice Guerra & Tatyana Zhuravleva, 2022. "Do women always behave as corruption cleaners?," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 191(1), pages 173-192, April.
    9. Alekseev, Aleksandr & Charness, Gary & Gneezy, Uri, 2017. "Experimental methods: When and why contextual instructions are important," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 134(C), pages 48-59.
    10. Vivi Alatas & Lisa Cameron & Ananish Chaudhuri & Nisvan Erkal & Lata Gangadharan, 2009. "Gender, Culture, and Corruption: Insights from an Experimental Analysis," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 75(3), pages 663-680, January.
    11. Arthur Schram, 2016. "Gordon Tullock and experimental public choice," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 27(2), pages 214-226, June.
    12. Ockenfels, Axel & Schier, Uta K., 2020. "Games as frames," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 172(C), pages 97-106.
    13. Bartuli, Jenny & Djawadi, Behnud Mir & Fahr, René, 2016. "Business Ethics in Organizations: An Experimental Examination of Whistleblowing and Personality," IZA Discussion Papers 10190, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    14. Christoph Engel, 2016. "Experimental Criminal Law. A Survey of Contributions from Law, Economics and Criminology," Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Economics 2016_07, Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Economics.
    15. David L. Dickinson & Jill Tiefenthaler, 2002. "What Is Fair? Experimental Evidence," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 69(2), pages 414-428, October.
    16. Christian Korth & J. Philipp Reiß, 2014. "Vacuous Information Affects Bargaining," Group Decision and Negotiation, Springer, vol. 23(4), pages 921-936, July.
    17. Paul M. Gorny & Petra Nieken & Karoline Ströhlein, 2023. "He, She, They? The Impact of Gendered Language on Economic Behavior," CESifo Working Paper Series 10458, CESifo.
    18. Terence C. Burnham & Aimee Dunlap & David W. Stephens, 2015. "Experimental Evolution and Economics," SAGE Open, , vol. 5(4), pages 21582440156, November.
    19. Frank Björn & Li Sha & Bühren Christoph & Qin Haiying, 2015. "Group Decision Making in a Corruption Experiment: China and Germany Compared," Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik), De Gruyter, vol. 235(2), pages 207-227, April.
    20. Christoph Engel & Sebastian Goerg & Gaoneng Yu, 2012. "Symmetric vs. Asymmetric Punishment Regimes for Bribery," Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Economics 2012_01, Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Economics, revised May 2013.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • C90 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - General
    • D44 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Auctions

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tin:wpaper:20140063. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/tinbenl.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.