On the demand for expressing emotions

Hosted by Carlos Oyarzun

People communicate in economic interactions either aiming to alter material outcomes or because they derive direct satisfaction from ex- pressing. We focus on the latter noninstrumental motivation and find that this less researched aspect of expression has important economic implications. In particular, we experimentally study ex-post verbal ex- pression in a modified Power-to-Take game and document people's willingness to pay for this kind of expression possibility. Our experiment contributes to previous studies discussing the role of mood-emotional states in economics. We find that purely expressive as well as reciprocal motives are both non-trivial components of the valuation for noninstrumental expression. We demonstrate that expression possibilities have important impacts on welfare beyond what our standard economic view predicts.