Essays on interactive economic behaviors

This thesis is composed of three projects investigating interactive economic behaviors. Chapter 2 investigates the link between urbanization and interpersonal trust by conducting a field trust game under a natural experiment context. I find that urbanization does not significantly decrease the trust...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Xu, Cheng
Format: Thesis (University of Nottingham only)
Language:English
Published: 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/65302/
_version_ 1848800208851304448
author Xu, Cheng
author_facet Xu, Cheng
author_sort Xu, Cheng
building Nottingham Research Data Repository
collection Online Access
description This thesis is composed of three projects investigating interactive economic behaviors. Chapter 2 investigates the link between urbanization and interpersonal trust by conducting a field trust game under a natural experiment context. I find that urbanization does not significantly decrease the trust towards co-villagers, meaning the in-group trust did not change statistically significantly. However, the trust towards outsiders does increase as a result of state-led urbanization. I also run a regression on the trust exhibited towards participants in the experiment and found the partial effect of whether they are co-villagers or outsiders weakens as a result of the urbanization, and therefore conclude urbanization decreases out-group discrimination in trust. The second project examines the gender effects on entrepreneurs’ competitiveness and innovative behaviors via a lab-experimental approach. This project finds (i) female participants are less inclined to choose a scheme with an uncertain payoff in an individual-oriented task-solving game whereas (ii) they are as willing as males to choose the scheme in a cooperative-oriented task-solving game. The last project looks into the impacts of humans’ early experiences on ethical behaviors. We found that (i) firms with CEOs who experienced the Great Chinese Famine score lesser in CSR ratings than the comparison group; (ii) this negative relation is more pronounced in firms with CEOs who were younger when they encountered the Great Chinese Famine.
first_indexed 2025-11-14T20:47:55Z
format Thesis (University of Nottingham only)
id nottingham-65302
institution University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
institution_category Local University
language English
last_indexed 2025-11-14T20:47:55Z
publishDate 2021
recordtype eprints
repository_type Digital Repository
spelling nottingham-653022025-02-28T15:12:07Z https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/65302/ Essays on interactive economic behaviors Xu, Cheng This thesis is composed of three projects investigating interactive economic behaviors. Chapter 2 investigates the link between urbanization and interpersonal trust by conducting a field trust game under a natural experiment context. I find that urbanization does not significantly decrease the trust towards co-villagers, meaning the in-group trust did not change statistically significantly. However, the trust towards outsiders does increase as a result of state-led urbanization. I also run a regression on the trust exhibited towards participants in the experiment and found the partial effect of whether they are co-villagers or outsiders weakens as a result of the urbanization, and therefore conclude urbanization decreases out-group discrimination in trust. The second project examines the gender effects on entrepreneurs’ competitiveness and innovative behaviors via a lab-experimental approach. This project finds (i) female participants are less inclined to choose a scheme with an uncertain payoff in an individual-oriented task-solving game whereas (ii) they are as willing as males to choose the scheme in a cooperative-oriented task-solving game. The last project looks into the impacts of humans’ early experiences on ethical behaviors. We found that (i) firms with CEOs who experienced the Great Chinese Famine score lesser in CSR ratings than the comparison group; (ii) this negative relation is more pronounced in firms with CEOs who were younger when they encountered the Great Chinese Famine. 2021-07-07 Thesis (University of Nottingham only) NonPeerReviewed application/pdf en arr https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/65302/1/Thesis%28Final%29.pdf Xu, Cheng (2021) Essays on interactive economic behaviors. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham. Behavioral economics
spellingShingle Behavioral economics
Xu, Cheng
Essays on interactive economic behaviors
title Essays on interactive economic behaviors
title_full Essays on interactive economic behaviors
title_fullStr Essays on interactive economic behaviors
title_full_unstemmed Essays on interactive economic behaviors
title_short Essays on interactive economic behaviors
title_sort essays on interactive economic behaviors
topic Behavioral economics
url https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/65302/