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We discuss how experimental analysis can be integrated into strategic human resources management (SHRM) research in Africa so as to develop theory and value principles to guide executives.

The model we propose – experiment-based SHRM – is predicated on the use of experimental approaches to demonstrate the value of SHRM and to derive principles that guide research and practice in Africa.

We illustrate how scholars can conduct experiments from an SHRM perspective.

We discuss the strengths and limitations of the model and suggest ways of maximizing its potential.

The technique is a resource for scholars of SHRM in Africa. They can use it to supplement other approaches for studying SHRM.

This chapter discusses a typology of experimental analysis. The lack of such a typology in the context of Africa makes it a valuable contribution. Thus, it fills a contextual gap in the SHRM research methodology literature. It can therefore help graduate students and junior faculty improve their research.

Culture is a central concept broadly studied in social anthropology and sociology. It has been gaining increasing attention in economics, appearing in research on labor market discrimination, identity, gender, and social preferences. Most experimental economics research on culture studies cross-national or cross-ethnic differences in economic behavior. In contrast, we explain laboratory behavior using two cultural dimensions adopted from a prominent general cultural framework in contemporary social anthropology: group commitment and grid control. Groupness measures the extent to which individual identity is incorporated into group or collective identity; gridness measures the extent to which social and political prescriptions intrinsically influence individual behavior. Grid-group characteristics are measured for each individual using selected items from the World Values Survey. We hypothesize that these attributes allow us to systematically predict behavior in a way that discriminates among multiple forms of social preferences using a simple, parsimonious deductive model. The theoretical predictions are further tested in the economics laboratory by applying them to the dictator, ultimatum, and trust games. We find that these predictions are confirmed overall for most experimental games, although the strength of empirical support varies across games. We conclude that grid-group cultural theory is a viable predictor of people’s economic behavior, then discuss potential limitations of the current approach and ways to improve it.

The causal relationship between the size of welfare benefits and the birth decisions of women on welfare has been explored in a number of studies using a variety of analytical approaches applied to vital statistics data, data from the Current Population Survey, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, or similar survey data. These studies typically use non-experimental methods to relate differences in birth rates or birth decisions across states to differences in welfare benefits levels. Analyses of this type have been criticized on several grounds. Benefits across states may be correlated with unobserved interstate differences that may also be related to birth decisions. Very often, these studies measure the key independent variable, welfare benefits level, as the cash benefit guarantee under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program for a household of fixed size, varying this amount by state of residence. Actual benefits paid will vary with household size, number of AFDC-eligible household members, other sources of income, and other factors.

This paper proposes and tests a model to explain the outcomes of three different information presentation formats. Based on cognitive fit theory, information visualization formats that best fit task characteristics are expected to lead to improved decision-making outcomes. We apply the Judgment and Decision-Making framework (Bonner, 2008) to investigate how certain factors can impact decision quality.

This study tests whether certain production variance presentation formats (percentages, dollar amounts, and schematic faces), task complexity, understanding of the presentation format, motivation, and effort increase the accuracy of a supervisor’s bonus calculation. A total of 281 students and professionals participated in this experiment. Their responses were examined using regression analysis.

Our results indicate that individuals mostly prefer the percentages presentation format and that the use of the percentages presentation format, a lower level of task complexity, and a better understanding of the variance presentation format lead to more accurate calculations in the experimental task.

Our study provides a call for further research on factors that influence the choice of presentation format as a potentially fruitful area for management accounting researchers.

We exhort practicing management accountants to exert direct influence on employees’ decision making through the use of variance presentation formats that fit their tasks and promote understanding.

Our experiment introduced two major innovations: it uses an interactive data visualization approach allowing subjects to select their preferred presentation format; and it focuses on production variances, a topic that has received less attention in the academic managerial accounting literature, but is still very relevant to practitioners.

This chapter examines how religion and religiosity shape economic norms in Villa Israel, an urban squatter settlement in Cochabamba, Bolivia. In Villa Israel, residents share water with others to help overcome limited access to drinking water. Using a mixed methods approach, we draw on the results of ethnographic research and economic experiments. The analyses yield three key results. First, there were strong norms of generosity and charitable giving in the community. Second, religiosity was positively associated with generosity. People who adhered to Christian conceptions of charity and frequently attended religious services were more likely to give generously. While wealth was a limiting factor on some families' ability to give water, there was no evidence that the rich and poor endorsed different norms of fair giving. Third, the norms of fair giving varied in the context of the three most common reciprocal relationships in the community (family members, coreligionists, and neighbors). Compared with neighbors, exchanges between family members and coreligionists were relatively generous and permissive of self-interest. Based on these results, we conclude that the presence of strong Christian norms of generosity and fair giving is an important institutional mechanism for facilitating water reciprocity in this community.

We design an experiment to investigate the influence of announced future variations in interest rates and prices on consumption decisions. In an experimental implementation of the discounted utility model, the subjects learn the entire paths of inflation and interest rates prior to deciding on a consumption path. We decompose the total change in consumption that results from changes in either interest rates or inflation rates into anticipation and impact effects. While impact effects are of similar orders of magnitude as in the model, future changes in inflation or interest rates exert substantially smaller effects on current consumption than predicted by the model.

The authors review current developments in experimental design for conjoint analysis and discrete choice models emphasizing the issue of design efficiency. Drawing on recently developed optimal paired comparison designs, theoretical as well as empirical evidence is provided that established design strategies can be improved with respect to design efficiency.

We report an experiment conducted to gain insight into factors that may affect revenues in English auctions and lotteries, two commonly used charity fund-raising formats. In particular, we examine how changes in the marginal per capita return (MPCR) from the public component of bidding, and how changes in the distribution of values affect the revenue properties of each format. Although we observe some predicted comparative static effects, the dominant result is that lottery revenues uniformly exceed English auction revenues. The similarity of lottery and English auction bids across sales formats appears to drive the excess lottery revenues.

Purpose – This chapter tests the effectiveness of different institutions to fundraise for environmental projects at tourism destinations.

Methodology – We conduct a series of experiments with tourists visiting the Island of Majorca, Spain, and test the fundraising capacity of a voluntary donation scheme, two tax levels, and a matching instrument. In the first treatment of our experiment, tourists have the opportunity to make a voluntary donation to a local environmental organization involved in environmental projects. In a high-tax and low-tax treatment, tourists are taxed some proportion of their initial endowment and then are allowed to make voluntary contributions from their remaining endowment. In a final treatment, the experimenters match, one-for-one, any voluntary donations.

Findings – We test the crowding-out hypothesis of taxes over voluntary environmental donations and find imperfect crowding-out (from 60% to 65% for different tax levels).We also explore potential crowding-in of matching instruments (widely used in nontourism settings for fundraising campaigns), but do not find any support for it.

Practical Implications – Our results support the conclusion that it would be reasonable to use voluntary donation programs and tourism taxes complementarily (instead of independently), to increase fundraising for environmental purposes at tourism destinations.

To study strategic information transmission in organizations, we conduct a simplified version (with only three states) of the sender-receiver game experiment designed by Wang, Spezio, and Camerer (2010), in which an informative sender advises an uninformed receiver to take an action (to match the true state), but has incentives to exaggerate. We also have the same subjects play the original five-state game. We find similar “overcommunication” behavior with Taiwanese subjects – messages reveal more information about the true state than what equilibrium predicts – that let us classify subjects into various level-k types. However, results from the simplified version are closer to equilibrium prediction, with more senders robustly classified as level-2.