Are emotions game- and role-dependent?
A scientific talk by Giuseppe Attanasi.
Date: 10 October 2024. (Thursday) 10:00 – 11:00
Location: Corvinus University of Budapest, C building room C.714
The organizers of the Corvinus Game Theory Seminar invite you to the scientific talk by Giuseppe Attanasi (Sapienza, Roma). The topic will be the following: “Modeling and experimental tests of belief-dependent feelings: are emotions game- and role-dependent?”
Abstract of the lecture:
There is extensive evidence from a variety of disciplines that in strategic settings agents exhibit persistent and significant deviations from self-interested maximizing behavior, mainly because of other-regarding preferences. Economic theory, in particular game theory, has tried to account for such social preferences.
An intriguing extension of traditional game theory that has been proposed is that players can be motivated by what are sometimes referred to as “psychological” utilities: in psychological games, a player takes the others into account through his own beliefs about the others’ choices (first-order beliefs) and about others’ beliefs (second-order beliefs).
Such belief-dependent preferences are important for understanding economic outcomes regarding e.g. anxiety and health, status and conformity, vengeance and wage rigidity, reputation and contracts. The range of topics that have been explored in models of belief-dependent preferences is wide: In his survey paper on “Emotions and Economic Theory”, Elster (1998) argues that a key characteristic of emotions is that “they are triggered by beliefs” (p. 49). He discusses, inter alia, anger, hatred, guilt, shame, pride, admiration, regret, rejoicing, disappointment, elation, fear, hope, joy, grief, envy, malice, indignation, jealousy, surprise, boredom, sexual desire, enjoyment, worry, and frustration.
The belief-dependent preference that has received more support in economic experiments is guilt aversion, i.e. the agent’s preference for not letting down the others’ beliefs on his own behavior (see the survey of Battigalli & Dufwenberg 2022). Guilt aversion has been found to be a driver of prosocial behavior in social dilemmas with asymmetric roles, and especially in the trust game, where the trustee’s guilt aversion implies that the more he believes the truster has trusted him, the more likely he would share after trust.
This seminar will introduce role-dependent models of guilt aversion in the trust and other social dilemma games (Attanasi et al. 2016) and review theory-driven experimental studies of the strategic impact of guilt aversion in social dilemma games (Attanasi et al. 2023).