Cafe Scientifica

Maddie Youakim

Chemistry Extra Credit

Stephen Burks

Who is Greedy and Who is not?

Stephen Burks, an Associate Professor of Economics and Management, compared Morris Reseident, UMM Student, and Trainee Truckers in the Behavioral Economics Laboratory to discover “who is greedy and who is not”. He started out with this idea for an experiment. She had 100 pie split in two. The proposer proposes a split. The receiver decides to accept or reject the split. If he or she accepts the split, money paid to both depending on the split. If he or she rejects he split, the money is paid to neither the proposer nor the receiver. He then went into talking about Homo-Economics which is stylized model of an economic decision maker. The fore of the standard microeconomic of individual behavior is a “rational” actor. There are some assumptions though. One can compare and evaluate any pair of options. Next diminishing marginal utility and material self-interest. Only material stud I consume matters to me, more is better, and there are no other significant economic motivations are all under material self-interest. He then talked about key substantive issue, the experiment, and extensions and variations. When it came to the experiment, he found that the most frequent offer was split it 50-50 but the average offer is usually around 40%. The problem is as long as rejections of low offers are to be expected, we can’t directly tell whether high offers come from materially self-interested motivations or some other motivations.

When it came to the key substantive issue, anonymity is essential to applying the model here since material self-interest can be sophisticated. His focus of the experiment was John List and Steve Levitt. They wrote an influential paper in 2007. They said that lab measurements of social preferences need not be taken too seriously. They also said student subjects are more idealistic.

He had another study called new hire panel study which lasted 23 Saturdays over...