Seminar: Youenn Loheac, ESC Bretagne Brest.

Title: Time and Teams: An experimental Study about Group Inter-temporal Choice.

Abstract:

In this paper, we use experimental data to investigate collective decision making in inter-temporal choices. To this end, we build an experimental design where we first elicit individual time preference by using Andersen et al. 2008’s method, basically a choice over delayed rewards. In a second step, subjects are randomly assigned to groups of different sizes and then should make a collective decision about the same delayed rewards than in the first step. Such collective decision should enforce particular rules (majority voting or unanimity voting), but in all groups, subjects have the opportunity to have a limited but repeated communication period with other group members by informing them about their own favorite option. We had four treatments by varying group size (small or large groups) and institutional rule (majority or unanimity). Our main results are the following. First, in the unanimity treatment, groups tend to be less impatient than in the majority treatment, i.e. choose less frequently the more immediate reward. Such a result is explained by the fact that, in unanimity rule, conflicts are less frequent for a given group size. Moreover, we observe that conflicts tend to grow when group size is increased (from 3 to 7 subjects).