IFREE-Sponsored Lecture Series at ESI

Jim Engle-Warnick, Ph.D.
Feb. 11th, 2011

"Social Exchange and Risk and Ambiguity Preferences"

My work pertaining to behavior in institutions in experimental economics is informed and guided by the research being conducted at the ESI, and it is this connection I am emphasizing here. I think of much of the work at ESI as exploring the origins of fundamental institutional qualities that cannot be fully explained empirically.

I am interested in measuring institutions, and in quantifying, where possible, the effect of an institutional quality on decision-making. As an example, my current work on the effect of participation on risk preferences, coordination, and common pool resource usage documents the importance of subject participation in their own social learning about decision-making in an institution. In fact, much of ESI research provides great opportunities for subjects to chat or otherwise participate socially in the experiment itself, which greatly enriches the experimental results.

As another example of ESI connection, my current work using Ostrom’s decision-rule framework to measure the state of an institution also parallels work at ESI. Such decision rules, while not the subject of ESI research, appear in the social exchange results observed in the ESI laboratory.

I am grateful for the opportunity to have presented my work at the ESI/IFREE seminar, and continue to look to ESI for guidance on the institutional work that my collaborators and I are conducting.

Bio:
Jim Engle-Warnick is an Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in Economics at McGill University, where he has taught and conducted research for seven years. He is also Vice President of the Experimental Group at the Centre for Research and Analysis on Organizations in Montreal, where he manages CIRANO’s experimental laboratory.

Jim has conducted applied and experimental research on trust in repeated games, central bank decision-making, and on the risk and ambiguity preferences of subsistence farmers. His current projects include measuring ambiguity aversion to explain technology choice, measuring social agreement about the H1N1 virus, determining the characteristics of high school dropouts, and the effect of a central bank policy change to price level targeting from inflation targeting.

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