MEGAFONÍA DE EVACUACIÓN POR VOZ

The experimental sessions were conducted in 17 close -knit rural Kayan villages in Sarawak. The experiments reported in Chapters 2 and 3 were implemented in the same villages but a villager could only participate in one session. A villager that had participated in a session of the experiment reported in Chapter 2 was prevented from participating in this experiment. Members of the same household may participate in different sessions but not in the same one. The order of this chapter and Chapter 2’s experimental sessions was randomized, i.e. subjects that were scheduled for a session in the afternoon have no idea whether the session she/he participated is the same with the morning session. However due to practical reason, there is no restriction on communication between sessions, especially when sessions have to be conducted on the second day in a particular village²¹.

Each session required the involvement of 9 villagers. Experimental sessions lasted approximately two hours and were conducted in each village in a closed venue²². The description of the Kayan tribe and their social stratification nature was discussed in Chapter 2.

Each session consisted of 4 parts. Activities 1 and 2 are for social status and social closeness elicitations. Social status is elicited by asking villagers to privately rank others in the session and it is based on 5 status dimensions: success, wealth, ed ucation, physical

21 To mitigate the possibility that information and solution on this particular experiment from being discussed by subjects that participated a day before, I randomized the color of the GP_S. On some day, it is red and on some it is blue. A village at most hold 3 experimental sessions for both

experiment and there are villages with just 1 session for both experiments. Research team tried their best to wrap all experimental session within a day, but it is impossible for some villages.

22 Locations used included village’s meeting rooms, village homestay and chief’s residences.

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fitness and extraversion (outgoingness). In the social closeness elicitation task, each subject picked one of seven diagrams that best described her/his social closeness with each of the other 8 subjects in the session. Details on the implementation methodology is in Chapter 2 as Activities 1 and 2 of this chapter’s experimental design are identical to its Activities 1 and 2. The Sender-Receiver Agency Game was implemented as Activity 3. In Activity 4, villagers answered questions about themselves in private with an enumerator. Participants were consistently reminded that their actions, decisions and answers would be private and would not be disclosed to other villagers²³.

Table 3.6 below provides an overview of the session structure.

Table 3.6. Overview of experimental design

Activity 1 Social closeness & social status elicitation

(randomized order) Activity 2

Activity 3 One-shot Sender-Receiver agency game with disclosure of villagers’ roles and

identities

Activity 4 Socio-economic survey

After completing Activities 1 and 2, participants were randomly allocated in a group of three. Within each group, they received their role assignment at random. Each group consisted of a Sender and two Receivers. Instructions for Activities 1 and 2 are identical to instructions of Activities 1 and 2 for Chapter 2. Instruction for social closeness can be found on page 103 under Chapter 2’s Appendix C while instructions for social relationship closeness is in Appendix D of Chapter 2 on page 109.

Subjects were then told that the villager in the role of the Sender will receive two cards, one showing the parameterized value of ‘X’ above and the other one showing the value of ‘Y’. The Sender will be told to pick X or Y for a ‘Blue Project’, i.e. GP_S from above is labelled as ‘Blue Project’ during implementation. The relevant materials for the Sender can be found in the Appendix as Figures 3.8 to 3.17. Bef ore the Sender decides,

23 Participants’ names were only used in recruitment process, consent form and payment receipts.

The documents with participants names were not linked to participants numerical identifier in the session.

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both Sender and Receivers were informed that the Sender’s decisions would be processed and there is a probability p that the Sender’s selection could be swapped with the other option when the Blue Project is being processed.

Behind a private partition, the Sender is provided with two opaque envelopes. Each card needs to be placed in an envelope. Once the Sender is ready, the experimenter will approach the Sender with two large envelopes. One large envelope will have a big blue star on it and the other envelope will have a big blue pentagon on it. The Sender is then requested to place the opaque envelope containing the outcome that she/he wants for the group into the envelope with the large blue star. The envelope with the unwanted outcome is going to be placed in the envelope with the large blue pentagon.

After that, both big envelopes were handed to the experimenter. Before the Sender leaves the partition, he/she answers questions related to her/his expectations on the Receivers’ actions. He/she is asked which project the Receivers will pick as a consensus and which one will be preferred by Receiver 1 and by Receiver 2.

Standing in front of all subjects in the session, the experimenter sets the ‘Red Project’.

Red Project is the label used for GP_O during the experiment’s implementation. First, the experimenter takes a card that represents the parameterized value of vector Z and places it in an opaque envelope. Second, the envelope is then placed into a big envelope that has a big red star on it. Then the same procedure is repeated but a card that represents the parameterized value of Y goes into a big envelope with a big red pentagon. The payoff from vector Z is illustrated in the booklet and it is Figure 3.12.

X or Y selected by the Sender is in the blue star envelope while Z is in the red star envelope. Subjects had already been told that both Blue and Red Projects need to be processed; from the game description, this is where the noise was incorporated.

Processing will happen through a dice roll. A random receiver from each group was asked to throw a dice and then inform everyone of the roll’s outcome. The experimenter then will roll a dice in private. If the outcome from the experimenter’s roll is the same as the receiver’s roll, then the content in the blue star envelope will be swapped with the content of the blue pentagon envelope. On the other hand, if the outcome from experimenter’s roll is different from the receiver’s roll, the content of the blue star envelope will remain as it was. The same procedure is repeated for the red project. From this randomization process, there is 1/6 chance that the contents of

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the envelope with the blue star will be swapped with the contents of the envelope with the blue pentagon. There is also 1/6 chance that the content of the envelope with the red star will be swapped with the content of the envelope with the red pentagon.

Subjects will be told that Receivers have an option of selecting the blue star or the red star envelope²⁴. The blue star envelope contained the X or Y while the red star enveloped contained Z.

Individual Receivers, in turn, will be asked to go to the private partition to indicate their preferences to implement GP_S or GP_O. At the decision partition, each Receiver states the Group Project she/he prefers to be implemented. After that each Receiver will be asked to state her/his belief with respect to the content of the envelope with the blue star, i.e. their belief whether the Sender recommends vector X or Y to GP_S. The Receiver will also be asked to state her/his expectation about the co -Receiver’s preference. After the preferences and expectations of both Receivers have been elicited separately, both Receivers were called to the private partition. Here the y were told to form a consensus on either the Blue Project or the Red Project. Subjects’ payoffs depended on the content of the envelope selected. The instruction, its local language translation and illustration given to the villagers in the experiment can be found in Appendix B.

Both Receivers held discussion to reach a joint decision or a consensus. All pairs of Receivers arrived at a consensus after a few minutes of discussion. Eliciting expectations from each Receiver during their individual decision-making stage helped to make a pair of Receivers arrive at their consensus decisions quickly²⁵. Making a pair of Receivers agree on a decision did not cause any problem as all of them arrived at their decision quickly. There is the possibility that the non-anonymous setting facilitates this process.

We recruited 324 villagers at random consisting of 108 as Senders and 216 as Receivers. An average Sender earned MYR23.10 (£ 4.43) while an average Receiver earned MYR18.92 (£3.63). 36 experimental sessions were conducted from December

24 We randomized the GP-S and GP-O labelling of blue and red according to session. For example, in some sessions, GP-S is identified as the red project. This is to rule out any possibility that one colour is systematically preferred over the other. A statistical test found that Receivers selected blue or red projects based on the possible content, and not colour.

25 We did not time the duration of discussion by a pair of Receivers given the logistics of handling three different timers for three different groups at the same time.

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2016 to February 2017. Table 7 below contains the summary statistics of villagers that participated as subjects in this experiment.

Table 3.7. Summary statistics of subjects’ characteristics

Personal Characteristics Mean Min Max

Age (years) 44.12 18 90

Male 0.413

Years in Education (years) 7.53 0 17

Cash crop 0.546

Aristocracy strata 0.101 Former slave strata 0.157 Village council 0.241 Migrant to the village 0.247

Observations 324

Note: Variables in Table 3.7 were elicited in Part 4 after the sender-receiver agency game was concluded. Age refers to the age of the subjects. Variable male takes a value of 1 if the subject is a male, if the subject is a female that variable will take a value of 0. Years in education is the number of years a subject received formal schooling. Before 2015, the compulsory years of schooling in Malaysia was 6. Variable cash crop takes a value of 1 if the output from subjects’ agricultural activities are commodities like palm oil or rubber.

Aristocracy strata takes a value of 1 if a subject reported she/he is a maren (a member of aristocracy households), non-maren subjects are identified as 0 in aristocracy strata.

Variable village council takes a value of 1 if the subject is a member of village community council. Those in the slave strata were prevented from migrating in the past.

Migration to a village only happened with permission from the village’s head. If a villager is an adult migrant, variable migrant to the village takes a value of 1, otherwise it is 0. Only variable ‘former slave strata’ was not elicited directly from the subjects. The mean for variables male, cash crops, aristocracy strata, former slave strata, village council, and migrant to the village reports the share of the subjects that reports they have the variable’s characteristics. For example, the share of aristocracy in sampled subjects are 0.101.

As such, there is similar concern on subjects’ education levels in enabling them to understand this experiment’s instructions. Table 3.7 shows that villagers recruited for the experiment had an average of 7.53 years of education. This is above minimum years of schooling of 6 years under the Malaysian education policy. Regardless, there are subjects recruited that did not finished a year of school. To mitigate this heterogeneity in subjects’ education levels, everyone had to answer two control questions before deciding. Control questions posed to the villagers playing in the role of Sender can be found in Appendix B3 and Appendix

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B4, while Appendices B5 and B6 have the control questions for those in the Receivers’ role. Scripts for control questions start on page 212. Subjects were allowed three trials and could ask clarifying questions before deciding. 65% of the subjects answered the control questions correctly in the first try while the instructions for the game had to be explained in full for 28 subjects (8.7% of the total)²⁶. Full explanation was be given to subjects who failed to answer the control questions three times in a row or if the subjects asked for it, even in their first try. The ratio of default against requested explanations is 9:5. The breakdown of subjects’ responses to the control questions is in Table 3.1A of this chapter’s Appendix.