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Oct 3, 2012: Prof. Shachar Kariv, UC Berkeley

We compare behavior in modified dictators game during the “Great Recession” to behavior in otherwise identical experiments conducted amidst the economic boom that preceded it. The experiments capture both differences in indexical selfishness and differences in equality-efficiency tradeoffs. Subjects exposed to the recession exhibit higher levels of indexical selfishness and greater emphasis on efficiency relative to equality. Reproducing recessionary conditions inside the laboratory by confronting subjects with negative payoffs relative to initial endowments intensifies selfishness and increases the willingness to trade equality for efficiency, though the impact is modest relative to that of the real-world economic downturn. [paper pdf]

Prof. Shachar Kariv was educated at Tel Aviv University and New York University, where he received his Ph.D. in economics in 2003, the same year he joined the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Professor and the Faculty Director of UC Berkeley Experimental Social Science Laboratory (Xlab), a laboratory for conducting experiment-based investigations of issues of interest to social sciences. He was a visiting member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton (2005-6), a visiting professor at the European University Institute (2008), a visiting fellow at Nuffield College of the University of Oxford (2009), and a visiting professor at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya (2011-12).