Monetary Costs Versus Opportunity Costs in a Voting Experiment

Yoichi Hizen and Kengo Kurosaka ()
Additional contact information
Kengo Kurosaka: Hiroshima Shudo University

No SDES-2021-1, Working Papers from Kochi University of Technology, School of Economics and Management

Abstract: Monetary incentives are widely used to reproduce various voting environments in the laboratory. In actual elections, however, non-monetary opportunity costs play a role in voter turnout. Our research question was two-fold; whether the effect of opportunity costs on voter turnout differs from the effect of monetary costs, and if so, to what extent they differ. To generate opportunity costs, we asked participants to work on tasks for two minutes; they were rewarded for successful task completions but lost thirty seconds if they chose to vote. Our regression analysis suggested that nearly half of the participants’ decisions took account of opportunity costs as well as monetary costs, and that for such decisions, the effect of opportunity costs on voter turnout was about one-third of the effect of monetary costs. These observations attribute the “paradox of voter turnout†to the misperception and/or depreciation of voting costs.

Keywords: Laboratory experiment; Monetary incentives; Opportunity cost; Paradox of voter turnout; Finite mixture model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D72 D90 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2021-02, Revised 2021-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in SDE Series, February 2021, pages 1-49

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.souken.kochi-tech.ac.jp/seido/wp/SDES-2021-1.pdf First version, 2021 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kch:wpaper:sdes-2021-1

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Kochi University of Technology, School of Economics and Management Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sachiko Minami ().