Note: This workshop was held with Center for Experimental Research in Social Sciences, Hokkaido University.

Date: August 7, 2008 (Thursday) 10:30-15:30

Location: Hokkaido University, The Humanities and Social Science Building, room W309

Speakers: Yaniv Hanoch, Michaela Gummerum (University of Plymouth) 

Participants: Toshio Yamagishi, Tatsuya Kameda, Masaki Yuki, Susumu Ohnuma, Others (16 participants): Total 20 participants

Contents: 
Yaniv Hanoch
“Choosing the right drug plan: Older adults, choice size, and numeracy”

Medicare Part D, a government based health insurance, has more than 50 insurance plans. However, the program is too complicated and beneficiaries favor a limited number of plans. This study aims to test the impact of the number of choices and age on objective and subjective measures of performance in choosing a prescription drug plan. The results show that older adults performed worse than younger adults and increase in the number of choices is detrimental to performance. From these results, he suggested the number of insurance choice should be decreased.

Michaela Gummeru
“The development of prosocial behaviour in children and adolescents”

Professor Gummeru talked about a series of research that shows how children’s prosocial behavior in economic games can be explained. In an experiment, children were instructed to play a dictator game, a sequential prisoner’s dilemma game, and a third-party punishment game. The result shows that younger children showed less reciprocity than adults. And older elementary school children do bestow prosocial behavior selectively, depending on the amount of social information. Her results indicated that norms that guide specific social interactions are not present from birth but have to be learned.