Disappointment Aversion and Social Comparisons in a Real-Effort Competition

Simon Gaechter, Lingbo Huang and Martin Sefton
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Simon Gächter

No 6489, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We present an experiment to investigate the source of disappointment aversion in a sequential real-effort competition. Specifically, we study the contribution of social comparison effects to the disappointment aversion previously identified in a two-person real-effort competition (Gill and Prowse, 2012). To do this we compare “social” and “asocial” versions of the Gill and Prowse experiment, where the latter treatment removes the scope for social comparisons. If disappointment aversion simply reflects an asymmetric evaluation of losses and gains we would expect it to survive in our asocial treatment, while if losing to or winning against another person affects the evaluation of losses/gains we would expect treatment differences. We find behavior in social and asocial treatments to be similar, suggesting that social comparisons have little impact in this setting. Unlike in Gill and Prowse we do not find evidence of disappointment aversion.

Keywords: real effort competition; social comparison effects; disappointment aversion; reference-dependent preferences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D12 D81 D84 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp6489.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: DISAPPOINTMENT AVERSION AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS IN A REAL‐EFFORT COMPETITION (2018)
Working Paper: Disappointment Aversion and Social Comparisons in a Real-Effort Competition (2017)
Working Paper: Disappointment Aversion and Social Comparisons in a Real-Effort Competition (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_6489

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().