Econ Papers Daily / 期刊论文
敲竹杠问题与沟通：实验证据
The hold-up problem and communication: Experimental evidence
摘要
The hold-up problem plays a central role in organizational and institutional economics. According to standard theory, an investor may have insufficient incentives to invest in a relationship with a trading partner when the investor anticipates that in future negotiations the trading partner might behave opportunistically, so the investor’s costs might not be recouped. In a prominent paper-and-pencil experiment, Ellingsen and Johannesson (2004a) have shown that communication can mitigate the hold-up problem. They allow either the investor or the trading partner to send a single text message to the other player. In order to study the robustness of their findings, we replicate their setup in an online experiment, allowing for a larger number of observations and a different subject pool. Moreover, we extend the original setup by adding a treatment with bilateral communication in order to find out whether or not the possibility of arguing back and forth can further alleviate the hold-up problem.
中文摘要
敲竹杠问题在组织与制度经济学中居于核心地位。根据标准理论，当投资者预期在未来谈判中交易伙伴可能采取机会主义行为、以致其成本可能无法收回时，投资者对与交易伙伴建立关系的投资激励可能不足。在一项著名的纸笔实验中，Ellingsen和Johannesson（2004a）表明沟通能够缓解敲竹杠问题。他们允许投资者或交易伙伴中的一方单向向另一方发送一条文本信息。为研究其发现的稳健性，我们在在线实验中复制了他们的实验设置，从而获得更大的观测样本量和不同的被试群体。此外，我们通过增加一个双向沟通的处理组扩展了原始设置，以考察来回争论的可能性是否能够进一步缓解敲竹杠问题。