Person: Barber, Benjamin
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Benjamin
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Barber
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IE University
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IE Business School
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Strategy
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Publication The origin of wealth matters: Equity norms trump equality norms in the ultimatum game with earned endowments(Elsevier, 2019-02) Barber, Benjamin; English, William; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75We conduct an ultimatum game with three treatments: one in which endowments are earned through a real effort task (answering spelling questions under time pressure), one in which endowments are awarded through lotteries, and a standard ultimatum game with exogenously provided wealth. When subjects earn the money at stake, the modal response ceases to be an equal split, as proposals anchor around comparative earnings and these proposals are statistically different from those observed in the other treatments. Moreover, roughly half of lower earners propose keeping less than 50% of the pot for themselves. We argue that these results are best explained by Bicchieri’s account of norms and that equity, rather than equality, becomes the dominant norm in ultimatum bargaining when endowments are earned.Publication Indoctrination and coercion in agent motivation: Evidence from Nazi Germany(Sage Journals, 2018-02-09) Miller, Charles; Barber, Benjamin; Bakar, Shuvo; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75How do principals combine indoctrination and coercion to motivate their agents? Based on previous literature, we argue that indoctrination on the one hand and coercion on the other are substitutes in agent motivation—more of one requires less of the other. But measuring this substitution effect is hard since individuals often self-select into ideological organizations and have incentives to claim insincerely to be ideologically motivated. Using a novel dataset of wartime behavior contained in a large sample of World War II German service records, we present a solution to these problems. We find convincing evidence to support our theory—the German army was able to induce similar effort levels from soldiers who had and had not been in the Hitler Youth, though Hitler Youth alumni required fewer punishments.Publication Ideas and Combat Motivation: Propaganda and German Soldiers' Performance in World War II(Cambridge University Press, 2019-06-09) Barber, Benjamin; Miller, Charles; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75What explains combat motivation in warfare? Scholars argue that monitoring, material rewards, and punishment alone are insufficient explanations. Further, competing ideological accounts of motivation are also problematic because ideas are difficult to operationalize and measure. To solve this puzzle, the authors combine extensive information from World War II about German soldiers’ combat performance with data about conditionally exogenous potential exposure to Nazi radio propaganda. They find evidence that soldiers with higher potential exposure to propaganda were more likely to be decorated for valor even after controlling for individual socioeconomic factors, home district characteristics like urbanization, and proxies for combat exposure.Publication Pushing for speed or scope? Pharmaceutical lobbying and Food and Drug Administration drug review(Wiley, 2019-04-02) Barber, Benjamin; Diestre, Luis; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75We argue firms implementing political activities face a fundamental trade-off between the content and the speed of public officials’ decisions. We show evidence of this trade-off looking at FDA drug approvals: lobbying for broader drugs leads to longer revisions, whereas lobbying to speed up the review process leads to narrower drugs. How do firms respond to this trade-off? We argue firms’ lobbying strategies depend upon the level of IP protection behind their drugs. We predict that firms with high levels of IP protection will lobby for drug scope, whereas firms with low levels of IP protection will lobby for revision speed. We find support for our theory in a sample of 540 new drug applications to the FDA from 1998 to 2015.Publication Revisiting the Democracy-Private Investment Nexus: Does Inequality Matter?(Elsevier, 2018-12-01) Aköz, Kemal Kivanç; Jensen, Jeffrey; Zenker, Christina; Barber, Benjamin; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75Contrary to the predictions of a large theoretical literature, recent cross-country evidence suggests autocracies can generate statistically indistinguishable levels of private investment compared to democracies. We argue that the previous exclusion of inequality explains part of this puzzle. We model current investment as a function of investors' beliefs about future tax rates, which are conditioned by the constraints on the Executive in setting tax rates and expropriating tax revenues. In democracies, where tax rates re ect the preferences of the median voter, investment declines with rising inequality. In autocracies, investor beliefs about future tax rates re ect the relative power of Elites compared to the Executive. As inequality rises, the increased resources available to Elites constrains the Executive's ability to expropriate more tax revenues. The heterogeneous determinants of investor beliefs can explain the observed pattern of investment across regime types. We test our predictions at the macro-level with cross-country macroeconomic data. We then test the behavioral underpinnings of our model with a novel laboratory experiment showing how inequality a ects individual-level investment behavior dependent upon regime type. Results from both types of analyses show that when inequality is taken into account autocracies can generate similar levels of investment to democracies.