【Date】 December 16th, 2025 (Tuesday) 12:30-13:30

【Venue】Shirogane Campus Takanawa Building 3F room 15318

【Zoom】https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82870613580

Meeting ID：828 7061 3580
Passcode：775357

【Speaker】Prof. Daniel Zizzo (Dean, School of Economics, The University of Queensland)

【Title】
Do You Behave like Sheep? Understanding Compliance and Peer Information Effects
By Ozan Isler and Daniel John Zizzo
(School of Economics, The University of Queensland)
https://www.danielzizzo.com/

【Abstract】
Do agents imitate others even where there is no rational advantage from doing so? Do they rely on information about what peers are doing? Do they comply with peer advice or with a request by an authority? Is rule following itself a motivation? We develop a stylized experimental paradigm to understand whether, in the simplest possible settings that minimize any likelihood of informational or other rational mechanisms, agents react to information about peer behavior and requests from an authority (or from peers). We do this by employing a sequence of online experiments with representative samples of the U.S. population and with pre-registered experimental designs. The basic setup of our online experiments involves a one-shot choice between two options implying the same or different payoffs, with control questions to check for understanding, attention to the task, and reasons for participants’ choices. Our key findings are that, even when it is costly, around 60% of participants comply with a request by an authority. There is no evidence for rule following beyond this. We find no evidence for imitation or for any effect of peer behavior information; and, if it is a peer making a request, this is also ineffective. The results are not aligned with what experts or our generative AI simulations predict. Future research can modify our stylized experimental paradigm to determine what drives real-world conformism.