Abstract
We replicate Andreoni (Quarterly Journal of Economics 110: 1–21, 1995)’s finding that agents behave more selfishly when taking from a public account than when giving to a public good. Based on a neutral language setting we add new insights into motivations to give or take in a linear public good setting: we find that Andreoni’s result is partly driven by the complete elimination of giving options in the taking frame. However, a pure extension of the action space into the taking domain also leads to a significant increase in selfish behavior.
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Notes
Subjects were asked to transfer tokens between their private and the group account.
We deliberately chose asymmetric bounds in the negative and positive domain in order to avoid a potential focal point at the mid-point of the action space to coincide with ‘0’ contribution decisions.
We mainly followed the instructions of Fehr and Gächter (2000), but slightly changed the wording. For instance, instead of ‘contributions to a project’, instructions asked participants to divide tokens between a private and a group account. Instructions can be found in Supplementary material.
In case a participant did not answer the questions correctly, a help screen explained the correct answers in detail.
Column (I) takes a most conservative approach by taking the group average of contributions across all periods as dependent variable. Columns (II) and (III) control for interdependencies of decisions across periods by including individual random effects and clustering standard errors at the group level. The results are stable to using different specifications like group average of contributions per period as dependent variable or a linear time trend.
This difference is also found using a Mann–Whitney test based on first period individual contribution levels (p = 0.07), but does not show up when comparing group averages across all periods (p = 0.27). Using the Welch t test appears, however, more appropriate: a Shapiro–Wilk W test cannot reject the hypothesis of normality for both distributions and a Levene’s test shows that the variances of the samples of GIVE and TAKE are not equal (p = 0.014). In this case, Ruxton (2006) and Fagerland and Sandvik (2009) advise using the Welch’s t test for unequal variances instead of the Mann–Whitney test as it performs better than the Mann–Whitney test in terms of controlling Type I errors.
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We thank participants of the 2011 ESA European Conference in Luxembourg, 2011 EAERE Annual Conference in Rome, the 2011 Florence Workshop on Behavioral and Experimental Economics, and seminar participants at several universities for helpful comments.
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Khadjavi, M., Lange, A. Doing good or doing harm: experimental evidence on giving and taking in public good games. Exp Econ 18, 432–441 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-014-9411-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-014-9411-2