Experience in Public Goods Experiments

Anna Conte, Maria Levati and Natalia Montinari ()

No 2014:20, Working Papers from Lund University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We use information on students' past participation in economic experiments, as stored in our database, to analyze whether behavior in public goods games is affected by experience (i.e., previous participation in social dilemma-type experiments) and history (i.e., participation in experiments of a different class than the social dilemma). We have three main results. First, at the aggregate level, the amount subjects contribute and expect others to contribute decrease with experience. Second, a mixture model reveals that the proportion of unconditional cooperators decreases with experience, while that of selfish individuals increases. Finally, history also influences behavior, although to a lesser extent than experience. Our findings have important methodological implications for researchers, who are urged to control for subjects' experience and history in their experiments if they want to improve the external validity and replicability of their results.

Keywords: Public goods experiments; Social preferences; Mixture models; Experience; History (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C35 C51 C72 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2014-05-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-gth
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Experience in public goods experiments (2019)
Working Paper: Experience in Public Goods Experiments (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2014_020

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