IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/halshs-00175061.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Cooperation, Competition, and Risk Attitudes: An Intergenerational Field and Laboratory Experiment

Author

Listed:
  • Gary Charness

    (Department of Economics - UC San Diego - University of California [San Diego] - UC - University of California)

  • Marie Claire Villeval

    (GATE - Groupe d'analyse et de théorie économique - UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2 - ENS LSH - Ecole Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, IZA - Institute for the study of labor - Institute for the Study of Labor - IZA)

Abstract

The population of most developed societies is ‘graying'. As life expectancy increases and the large baby-boom generation approaches retirement age, this has critical consequences for maintaining a high standard of living and the sustainability of pension systems. In the light of these labor-force and social concerns, we consider experimentally the comparative behavior of juniors (under 30) and seniors (over 50) in both experiments conducted onsite with the employees of two large firms and in a conventional laboratory environment with students and retirees. Our results are compelling. First, seniors are not more risk-averse, as opposed to the conventional stereotype. Second, both juniors and seniors react to the competitiveness of the environment and there is no significant difference in performance in the real-effort task across the generations when they are competing. Third, seniors are typically more cooperative than juniors in a team-production game. Cooperation is highest in groups in which there is a mix of juniors and seniors, suggesting that there are indeed benefits in maintaining a work force with diversity in age. Overall, the implication is that it is beneficial to define additional short-term incentives near the end of the workers' career to motivate and to retain older workers. A secondary, but important, issue is the external validity of conventional laboratory experiments. In general we do not find strong differences in behavior between workers and non-workers, indicating that laboratory experiments may not be such a bad approximation for the field environment.

Suggested Citation

  • Gary Charness & Marie Claire Villeval, 2007. "Cooperation, Competition, and Risk Attitudes: An Intergenerational Field and Laboratory Experiment," Post-Print halshs-00175061, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00175061
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00175061
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00175061/document
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Ochsen, Carsten, 2015. "The Ins and Outs of German Unemployment," VfS Annual Conference 2015 (Muenster): Economic Development - Theory and Policy 113223, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    2. Sproten, Alec N. & Schwieren, Christiane, 2012. "Age differences in the reaction to incentives – do older people avoid competition?," Working Papers 0522, University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics.
    3. Lucy Ackert & Ann Gillette & Jorge Martinez-Vazquez & Mark Rider, 2011. "Are benevolent dictators altruistic in groups? A within-subject design," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 14(3), pages 307-321, September.
    4. Ochsen, Carsten, 2009. "Regional labor markets and aging in Germany," Thuenen-Series of Applied Economic Theory 102, University of Rostock, Institute of Economics.
    5. Michał Krawczyk & Maciej Wilamowski, 2015. "Are we all overconfident in the long run? Evidence from one million marathon participants," Working Papers 2015-01, Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw.
    6. Lisa Anderson & Beth Freeborn & Jason Hulbert, 2012. "Risk Aversion and Tacit Collusion in a Bertrand Duopoly Experiment," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 40(1), pages 37-50, February.
    7. Uschi Backes-Gellner & Stephan Veen, 2008. "The Impact of Workforce Age Heterogeneity on Company Productivity," Working Papers 0078, University of Zurich, Institute for Strategy and Business Economics (ISU), revised Sep 2009.
    8. Lucy F. Ackert & Ann B. Gillette & Jorge Martinez-Vazquez & Mark Rider, 2009. "Risk Tolerance, Self-Interest, and Social Preferences," Experimental Economics Center Working Paper Series 2009-04, Experimental Economics Center, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University, revised Feb 2011.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    age; performance; labor market; discrimination; diversity; stereotypes; experiments;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • A13 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Social Values
    • B49 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - Economic Methodology - - - Other
    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
    • C93 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Field Experiments
    • J14 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of the Elderly; Economics of the Handicapped; Non-Labor Market Discrimination
    • J18 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Public Policy
    • J38 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Public Policy
    • J70 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Discrimination - - - General

    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:hal:journl:halshs-00175061. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    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.