Pau JUAN BARTOLI will defend his thesis on Friday 29th May 2026 at 03:00 PM (Online and Auditorium 5)
Title: Essays on Behavioral and Experimental Economics
Supervisor: Professor Ingela ALGER
To attend the conference, please contact the secretariat of the TSE Doctoral school.
Memberships are:
- Ingela ALGER: Senior researcher, CRNS/TSE-R Supervisor
- Sébastien POUGET: Professor in Economics, Université Toulouse Capitole Examinateur
- Zwetelina ILIEWA: Professor in Economics, University of Bonn Examinatrice
- Boris VAN LEEUWEN: Associate Professor in Economics, Tilburg University Rapporteur
- Jiao PEIRAN: Associate Professor in Economics, Maastricht University Rapporteur
Abstract :
This dissertation examines how moral preferences shape economic and financial decision-making. Specifically, I study how individuals’ moral preferences shape their investment decisions, how individuals determine what is socially appropriate, and how they choose strategies in bargaining games. Methodologically, I combine theory and experimental methods using both reduced-form analysis and structural estimation. The dissertation consists of three papers, each corresponding to one chapter, and addresses two broad questions. First, how do moral preferences shape economic and financial decision-making? Second, how are moral judgments formed, and how do they interact with social preferences to influence decisions?
Chapter 1 studies how moral preferences shape individuals’ investment decisions. I conduct an experiment with U.S. investors, eliciting their willingness to pay for investments in firms that vary only in environmental impact. The experimental design varies (i) participants’ pivotality in affecting the firm’s externalities and (ii) the firm’s baseline level of externalities. These variations allow me to distinguish impact preferences from value alignment, and to examine whether participants value a firm’s current level of externalities independently of the investment impact. My main finding is that for investments that generate the same positive impact, participants prefer those that help firms transition from negative to positive externalities. Structural estimates indicate that this behavioral pattern is driven by two forces: an asymmetry in how participants value positive versus negative externalities, and diminishing sensitivity to externality size. Contrary to previous evidence, I find that participants are motivated primarily by impact preferences rather than by value alignment.
Chapter 2, which is joint work with José Ignacio Rivero-Wildemauwe, studies the rejection of positive offers in the Ultimatum Game. We find that a model combining social preferences and moral concerns provides a unifying explanation for these rejections while accounting for additional evidence. Specifically, we show that under the preferences iii considered, a positive degree of spite is a necessary and sufficient condition for rejecting positive offers. This indicates that social preferences, rather than moral concerns, drive rejection behavior. However, this does not imply that moral concerns are irrelevant. We show that rejection thresholds increase with individuals’ moral concerns, suggesting that morality acts as an amplifier of social preferences. Using data from van Leeuwen and Alger (2024), we estimate individuals’ social preferences and moral concerns with a finite mixture approach. Consistent with previous evidence, we identify two types of individuals who reject positive offers in the Ultimatum Game but differ in their behavior in the Dictator Game.
Chapter 3 proposes a framework in which social appropriateness rankings (injunctive norms) emerge endogenously from universalization reasoning: the tendency to evaluate an action by the payoff it would yield if everyone chose it. This is motivated by the fact that recent studies show that individuals’ decisions are shaped by their perceptions of socially appropriate behavior. Yet these studies elicit such perceptions without developing a theory of how individuals determine social appropriateness. This chapter fills this gap by providing a framework that allows one to compute the social appropriateness of any action without relying on beliefs, preferences, or choices. I test the theory’s predictions using existing evidence and new data from a laboratory experiment. The baseline framework performs well in several settings, but fails when individuals approve of actions that benefit others despite reducing social efficiency. I propose an extended framework, incorporating social preferences, that accounts for these departures and provides a tractable approach to analyzing norm heterogeneity.
