Terroir wines, mafia's externalities and death awareness: three essays in experimental economics and accounting
Autor: | Malaspina, Patrizia |
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Jazyk: | angličtina |
Rok vydání: | 2016 |
Předmět: |
organized crime
SECS-P/08 Economia e gestione delle imprese terroir SECS-P/07 Economia aziendale death stimuli social identity theory wine quality Settore SECS-P/08 - Economia e Gestione delle Imprese institutional environment ingroup bias Field experiment negative externalities charity tasting experiment criminal firms Settore SECS-P/07 - Economia Aziendale prosocial behavior donation decision Field experiment terroir wine quality tasting experiment organized crime mafia criminal firms competition negative externalities institutional environment terror management theory social identity theory ingroup bias prosocial behavior death stimuli charity donation decision mafia competition terror management theory |
Popis: | This doctoral thesis is composed by three research papers. The first chapter, titled "Terroir and Perceived Quality of Wine: Evidence from Tasting Experiments", is co-authored with Luca Nunziata. In this study we use experimental data in order to verify whether information about the terroir of a wine has a causal effect on the perceived wine quality and whether these pieces of information are more effective than the quality signal used for terroir products in the wine market: appellation (label) of origin. In order to address these issues we have carried out two wine-tasting experiments in three different shopping malls in Italy, using a random sample of 790 individuals. We used a Palizzi IGT red wine as it was awarded for its terroir expressiveness and it is an appellation not well known to consumers. Wine consumers in our samples are found to be able to use technical and detailed information about terroir to infer the quality of the wine and they exhibit a higher appreciation when receiving information about terroir rather than about the appellation of origin Palizzi IGT. The second chapter is titled "Criminal Firms: Exploring Negative Externalities on Non-Criminal Competitors" and it is co-authored with Antonio Parbonetti and Michele Fabrizi. The aim of this paper is to provide empirical evidence of the economic consequences due to the presence of firms connected with mafia-type criminal organizations located in developed areas. In particular, we verify for the first time how these criminal firms affect non-criminal competitors’ performance and we investigate the negative externalities that they inflict by using firm-level data. Our empirical analysis exploits exogenous shocks imposed by operations against Mafia (from 2008 to 2011) at municipality level to implement a difference-in-difference strategy that compares the change in performance of non-criminal firms with the change in performance of a control group of (non-criminal) firms that operate in either an industry or a municipality that have not been affected by these police operations. . The underlying idea is that these operations‘clean’ the industries and the municipalities where the targeted criminal firms operate, with a consequent beneficial effect on non-criminal competitors located in the geographical proximity. Results suggest that treated competitors experience a statistically significant and sizeable increase in EBITDA/Total Assets and ROA after the operation, with respect to comparison groups that have not been exposed to this shock. Further explorations permit us to verify that this positive effect is not merely due to a decrease in the industry size after the operations. Organized crime and criminal firms bring inefficiencies in the institutional and business environment that cause many distortions, such as in the access to procurement markets, especially for smaller firms. The third chapter, "Does Thinking About Death Make Us More Generous? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Cooperation with UNICEF", is a solo paper. In this study I draw on Social Identity Theory (SIT) and Terror Management Theory (TMT) to expand our understanding of the phenomenon of ingroup bias in charitable giving. I aim at investigating the effect of the use of death priming in emotive charity advertisement on potential donors’ decisions and ingroup bias. In particular I compare implicit and explicit priming of death thoughts against priming of thoughts related to disease and I explore the role of various dimensions of subjects' self-esteem in moderating their responses to implicit stimuli. To this purpose I conduct a field experiment in cooperation with UNICEF, which has involved 547 subjects. Main findings of this study show that in the control group we observe that on average ingroup bias is in favor of ingroup (white-skinned - Caucasian) recipients, rather than outgroup (black-skinned - African) ones. When thoughts of death are activated, both implicitly and explicitly, discriminatory behavior emerges at the expense of donors' ingroup and favorable towards the outgroup. Furthermore, implicit death effects arise independently from the level of general self-esteem and self-esteem’s relevant domains. This study produces interesting findings not only for the direct field of application. The integration of SIT and TMT offers valuable sparks for forthcoming economic analyses of ingroup bias in different settings. |
Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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