Publication:
Institutional influences on education investment and pro-social behaviour

dc.contributor.advisor Motta, Alberto en_US
dc.contributor.advisor Foster, Gigi en_US
dc.contributor.author Chen, Jie en_US
dc.date.accessioned 2022-03-15T12:49:30Z
dc.date.available 2022-03-15T12:49:30Z
dc.date.issued 2020 en_US
dc.description.abstract This thesis consists of three chapters. It studies, as a broad theme, the effectiveness of several institutional changes on individual decision-making based on experimental evidence. Chapter 1 is self-contained, with results purely based on a laboratory experiment. Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 are based on one field experiment in education. Chapter 2 describes the experimental settings and presents the overall results of the experiment, whereas Chapter 3 extends the analysis and focuses on treatment effects on women and men respectively. Chapter 1 shows how reward or punishment opportunities change contributions in a public goods game with 'privileged' members, where 'privilege' indicates that one's per-unit contribution to the public good produces a higher monetary return than is the case for others in the group. The main finding is that reward opportunities strongly increase group contributions in such groups while punishment opportunities do not. Reward also mitigates contribution decay over successive periods and improves social welfare. Chapter 2 mainly studies how rank incentives (i.e., relative performance information) in a milestone-based online assignment system affect students' academic performance. I find that rank incentives increase the likelihood of a student putting more effort in the online assignment. Rank incentives also have positive effects on low-performing students' exam marks while they have negative effects on high-performing students' exam marks. The positive effects seem driven by increased self-perceived stress, increased effort, and decreased procrastination. The negative effects seem driven by increased self-perceived happiness and re-allocation of effort. Chapter 3 studies how rank incentives and milestone information (i.e., information with reference to achievement milestones corresponding to different amounts of points earned) affect men's and women's academic performance differently. Women with access to the rank incentives experience a 0.19 SDs mark decrease in the first midterm, compared to women without this access. In the absence of relative performance information, men with access to the milestone information experience a 0.26 SDs mark increase in the final exam, compared to men without the access. The negative effects on women seem driven by their increased stress level, whereas men's improved exam performance seem driven by increased effort. en_US
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/1959.4/70419
dc.language English
dc.language.iso EN en_US
dc.publisher UNSW, Sydney en_US
dc.rights CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 en_US
dc.rights.uri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/ en_US
dc.subject.other Reward en_US
dc.subject.other Public goods game en_US
dc.subject.other Punishment en_US
dc.subject.other Lab experiment en_US
dc.subject.other Field experiment en_US
dc.subject.other Relative performance information en_US
dc.subject.other League en_US
dc.subject.other Academic outcome en_US
dc.title Institutional influences on education investment and pro-social behaviour en_US
dc.type Thesis en_US
dcterms.accessRights open access
dcterms.rightsHolder Chen, Jie
dspace.entity.type Publication en_US
unsw.accessRights.uri https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
unsw.date.embargo 2021-10-09 en_US
unsw.description.embargoNote Embargoed until 2021-10-09
unsw.identifier.doi https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/3972
unsw.relation.faculty Business
unsw.relation.originalPublicationAffiliation Chen, Jie, Economics, Australian School of Business, UNSW en_US
unsw.relation.originalPublicationAffiliation Motta, Alberto, Economics, Australian School of Business, UNSW en_US
unsw.relation.originalPublicationAffiliation Foster, Gigi, Economics, Australian School of Business, UNSW en_US
unsw.relation.school School of Economics *
unsw.thesis.degreetype PhD Doctorate en_US
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