Creativity in experimental economics

Seminari UJI:

Creativity in experimental economics

Sara Gil Gallen

Contractual assistant professor at the BETA, University of Strasbourg

A survey on experimental elicitation of creativity in economics
Giuseppe Attanasi†, Michela Chessa‡, Sara Gil-Gallen* and Patrick Llerena*
†Sapienza Università di Roma, ‡GREDEG, Université Côte d’Azur, and *BETA, Université de

Strasbourg

The interplay between individual creative ability and the way to enhance it is an issue with
tremendous potential for economic analysis. In this survey, we dwell on the issue by focusing on
the methodological advantages of economic experiments. We provide a review of the literature
in experimental economics on creativity, identifying seven main objects of study. Namely, the
impact on the creativity of: (1) low vs. high monetary incentives, (2) the interplay of monetary
incentives and tasks, (3) within-group competition, (4) within-group cooperation, (5) cultural
factors, (6) non-monetary social incentives, and (7) strategic behavior. We also classify the
studies in our review according to key features of standard experimental procedures in
economics, as the type of creative task, the way it is assessed, and the specific subject pool. This
multidimensional comparison allows us to conclude that the current lack of robust findings on
the determinants of creativity in economics might be due to the absence of comparable
experimental studies under the same experimental conditions. Our review also highlights the
crucial role of previous research on creativity in the psychological literature in shaping
procedures of elicitation of creativity in experimental economics.
Disentangling the role of surface and deep-level variables on individuals' and groups'

creative performance: A cross-level experimental evidence.
Anne-Gaëlle Maltese*, Sara Gil-Gallen,* and Patrick Llerena*

*BETA, Université de Strasbourg

We live in heterogeneous societies where individuals' characteristics, and social interactions
between them, have an impact on their production of creative outcomes. There exists a growing
literature addressing the variables having an impact on individuals' creative performance as well
as diversity having a multilevel effect at both the surface and deep levels on groups' collective
performance. The novelty introduced by this paper is capturing and disentangling the role of
those variables in individual and collective performance through the experimental methodology
and the implementation of a collective experiment. Thus, this paper aims to analyze the
diversity-creativity relationship by running a cross-level analysis based on individual and
collective creative performance. Furthermore, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first
experimental paper disentangling the role of such variables within individual creative
performance, considering convergent and divergent thinking by introducing three different types
of tasks: open, open with constraints, and closed. The results of our analysis concluded that
exists a mixed pattern of the impact of surface and deep-level variables on the individual
creative performance, knowing that it will differ according to the degree of openness of the task
selected. The only factor that arose persistently across degrees of openness was the self-
evaluation of the performance in the task, which positively relates to creative performance. At
the collective level, we observe different types of results according to the creative criteria we
focus on (originality or feasibility) for the gender composition of the groups. But we also

observe implications of individuals' training in creativity that may foster collective creative performance