Essays in behavioural, economic, and cognitive sciences.

This thesis is comprised of three separate chapters in Behavioural Science. The general underlying theme of the seven studies presented in this thesis involves a rank approach and influence in the elicitation and response to contextual distributions. Specifically, Chapter 1 addresses the influence of other people’s contributions (created to represent a diverse range of distributions of others’ contribution decisions) on aggregate cooperation and individual contributions in public goods games. It was found that participants take into account and are influenced by subtle aspects of what others contribute, providing a basis for the model we developed according to which participants have a preference for placing themselves at a specific relative ranked position within their inferred social norm of others’ contributions. Chapter 2 discusses the elicitation of participants’ market price distributions, quality estimates and market price estimates of a specific item in an endowment effect study in order to develop a model based on the quantification of “good dealness”. The model assumes no cognitive bias or ownership-induced changes in underlying preferences. It was found that sellers demanded a market-appropriate price for the item given their beliefs about the item’s relative quality and their beliefs about the distribution of market prices of similar items in the market. Buyers, in contrast, offered less than what they believed the appropriate market price to be because they would only offer a price that represented a good deal. Chapter 3 examines the elicitation of individuals’ subjective estimates of entire income and wealth distributions and also tested the idea that the unclear pattern of findings between income inequality and individual subjective well-being in previous literature reflects individual differences in people’s perception of income inequality. We found that on aggregate people are relatively accurate (and consistent across time) in their estimates of income and wealth inequality, although they overestimate incomes at all levels and overestimate low and high levels of wealth. However, there were some small individual differences in perceived inequality. Higher perceived inequality was associated with lower income/wealth and more liberal ideology. Various measures of subjective well-being were not predicted by perceived inequality of either income or wealth. Yet, people’s subjective well-being was best predicted by their subjective estimates of where they rank in the population, with the overall pattern of findings being consistent with a model in which people care about their perceived relative rank position within income and wealth distributions