Jus ved NTNU? (var: Koking etc.)

[Trond Andresen]

Undersøkelser av holdninger og kultur blant  bestemte kategorier studenter, er
interessante greier. En ting er jus, et annet område er økonomi. Her følger en sak
om økonomistudenter i USA. Fornøyelig lesning.

(Teknisk merknad: Det er muligens noen små trykkfeil der, fordi artikkelen er optisk
innlest fra en papirkopi.)

Trond Andresen
____________________________________________________

(the following is from THE ECONOMIST, May 29, 1993)

HOW DO YOU MEAN, "FAIR"?


SOMEBODY, presumably Groucho Marx, once offered the following advice: "The
secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've
got it made."


If you aren't smiling, you may be cut out for economics. Students of the
subject are trained to regard self-interest as the force that decides
economic choices. It is easy to imagine cases where cheating is
advantageous. The economist's view is: others will see that the logic of the
situation calls for cheating, so you had better cheat, too. This idea
pervades the literature. But here's a disturbing thing: it may be having
some effect. Nothing personal, but economists are an unpleasant lot.


The evidence is in a new paper by a team of one economist and two
psychologists from Cornell University *. It reviews several behavioural
studies. In one, firstyear graduate students were asked to take part in an
experiment. They were given some money, and told to divide it into two
accounts, one "private", one "public". Money in the private account was
given to the student at the end of the ex- periment. Money in the public
account was pooled, multiplied by a factor of more than one (the exact
figure varied), and then divided equally among all the students.


For society as a whole, as it were, the best thing is for the stu- dents to
put all their money into the public account. That creates the biggest pie,
which is then shared equally. But for each individual student, the best
thing is to put everything into the private account . That way, you get back
all your own stake, plus a full share of the pool provided by the suckers.
The study found that economics students contributed, on average, 20% of
their stakes to the public account. Students of other subjects contributed
50%. The researchers then asked the students to explain their actions: had
they worried about whether their decision had been fair? Nearly all the
non-economists said yes, they had worried. The response of the economists
was different:


More than one-third of Ihe economists either refused to answer the question
regarding what is fair, or gave very complex, uncodable responses. It seems
that the meaning of "fairness" in this context was somewhat alien for this
group. Those who did respond were much more likely to say that little or no
contribution was fair.


Another study involved a game played by an "allocator" and a "receiver". The
allocator was given $10 and asked to divide the cash between himself and the
receiver. The receiver could either accept the division (in which case, both
parties kept the sums proposed by the allocator) or refuse it (in which
case, both got nothing). Fairness calls for an equal split. But what does
self-interest tell the allocator to do? Only a non-economist could ask. The
answer is: keep $9.99, and give the receiver one cent. The receiver will not
refuse because one cent is better than nothing (and self-interest does not
understand spite). Note also that the game was played just once for each
pair, so there was no reason for the receiver to refuse in the hope of
prompting a better offer next time. As before, the study found that
economics students "performed significantly more in accord with the
self-interest model" than non-economists.


Other studies have found the same. A survey asked 1,245 randomly selected
college professors how much they gave to charity each year. About 9% of the
economics professors gave nothing; the proportion of professors in other
disciplines giving nothing ranged between 1.1% and 4.2% (despite generally
lower incomes than the economists). The median gift of economists to big
charities such as the United Way and viewer-supported public television was
substantially smaller than the median gift of non-economists.


The prisoner's dilemma a game where two players have to decide whether to
co-operate with each other or cheat has long been of great interest to
economists. The key feature is that for each player, "defecting" secures the
best outcome regardless of what the other does. But if both players accept
this logic and defect, they end up worse off than if they had co-operated.
The Cornell team conducted an experiment involving 267 prisoner's dilemma
games. Economics stu- dents defected 60% of the time; noneconomists defected
39% of the time.


Does training in economics make you mean or is it just that mean people are
somehow attracted to economics? To find out, the Cornell team did a further
experiment, to see whether students became more or less "honest" in a
hypothetical situation, after doing some economics. They compared three sets
of students: the first took a course in mainstream microeconomics, taught by
an instructor with an interest in industrial organisation and game theory;
the second took a similar course, but taught by a specialist on development
in Maoist China; the third took a placebo (astronomy). Across a range of
questions, the pattern was consistent: the first set contained the largest
proponion of students who became less honest; next came the second set;
honourably in the rear were the astronomers, with the smallest proportion of
students who became less honest.


Perhaps, then, there is a public interest in curbing the study of economics.
Or alternatively a conclusion that this column would prefer to endorse
economics needs to take psychology more seriously. The fact is that people
do co-operate more than the self-interest model (useful though it is) seems
to predict. As the Cornell team points out, recent research sheds light on
one reason for this.


Imagine a world in which people move from one prisoner's dilemma to the next
(ie, the real world). If people can choose their "partners" freely, and if
honest types can spot each other in advance, co-operators will be able to
interact selectively with each other - and will therefore do better than
cheats. Experiments have shown that people are surprisingly good at telling
co-operators and cheats apart, even on the basis of what seems to be limited
information.


So there you have it: narrowly self-interested behaviour is ultimately
self-defeating. Economics practised with that in mind could become the
uplifting science. If economists can only incorporate a bit of psychology,
they've got it made.


----

* Does Studying Economics Inhibit Co-operation?" By Robert Frank, Thomas
Gilovich and Dennis Regan. Journal of Economic Perspecives, Spring 1993.