 Business drinking: Evidence from a lab-in-the-field experimentJianxin Wang and Daniel Houser Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2025, vol. 230, issue C Abstract: Alcohol consumption is an important component of business negotiations across many cultures, yet this behavior remains unmodeled and its potential explanations untested. Here, we develop a theory that combines guilt-aversion with the canonical alcohol myopia framework. Our GAAM (guilt aversion and alcohol myopia) model predicts that intoxication increases promise-making, and will not decrease rate of promise-breaking. We test these predictions using a Prisoner's Dilemma game with pre-play communication in a lab-in-the-field experiment. Among males, we find behavior consistent with predictions: intoxication promotes promise-making but does not impact the rate at which promises are broken. Importantly, this implies intoxication increases the efficiency of communication. We do not observe intoxication to impact female promise-making or promise-breaking behaviors. This is consistent with previous empirical findings that females can display less sensitivity than males to alcohol-induced myopia. Our results provide an explanation for the widespread phenomenon of business drinking. Keywords: Business drinking; Communication; Guilt aversion; Alcohol myopia; Gender difference (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:230:y:2025:i:c:s0167268125000010 DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106881 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D. More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier |
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