Experimental Investigations of Strategic Interactions

This dissertation explores whether and when people act strategically: that is, how people's actions are influenced by others' actions (Chapters 1 and 2) and preferences (Chapter 3). Chapter 1, titled "Paternalistic Persuasion", studies whether paternalistic experts ("Advisors'') can make decision-makers ("Choosers'') better off by persuading them to change their behaviour. In a setting where Choosers are wary of Advisors' incentives, I experimentally investigate whether Advisors send recommendations that account for this wariness, and why they may fail to do so. I find that nearly 80% of Advisors send sub-optimal recommendations, but prompting them to think about Choosers' likely response is an effective way to correct this mistake. This suggests that the mistake stems from a failure to focus on recommending actions that are both welfare-improving and appealing to Choosers. Chapter 2, titled "Gender Differences in Job Application Strategies: An Experimental Investigation", is co-authored with Annabel Thornton. We experimentally investigate how gender differences in beliefs about a job's "competitiveness'' - the quantity and quality of its applicants - may make women less likely to apply for high-paying yet competitive jobs. We design a game where, without knowing one's rank, members of a group select one of three "jobs'': lotteries that either yield a large payoff to the best-ranked person who selects them, or guarantee a small payoff. We find that willingness to apply to a job decreases in the believed competitiveness of its applicant pool, and that gender differences in these beliefs create gaps in willingness to apply to the highest-paying competitive job. Chapter 3, titled "Preference Aggregation in Social Choice Under Risk", studies decision-makers' willingness to accommodate others' preferences when making "social choices": choices that influence both one's own and others' welfare. I design an experimental task that can answer these questions in two-person social choice problems, and use it to study social choice under risk. I find that over one-third of decision-makers are willing to accommodate a recipient's risk preferences. These decision-makers accommodate wide ranges of preferences, but tend to favour preferences that are similar to their own. Recipients' preferences carry the greatest weight when the decision-maker's own preferences are incomplete.

Department dc:contributor.department

Economics

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Ballyk, Alexandra Aline DeMarco

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Halevy, Yoram

• Behavioural Economics
• Experimental Economics
• Microeconomic Theory

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1807/150019

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/150019