Conditional cooperation in the field: Cross-country skiers' behavior in sweden

Tobias Heldt

Natural Field Experiments from The Field Experiments Website

Abstract: In a laboratory one-shot public good game, Fischbacher, Gachter and Fehr (2001) classify 50 percent of the subjects as conditional cooperators. Outside the lab, using a student sample, Frey and Meier (2005) find that people behave pro-socially, conditional on others' behavior. This paper tests for conditional cooperation and social comparisons in a natural field experiment, using decisions from a sample of cross-country skiers in Sweden on the issue of voluntary cash contributions to the preparation of ski tracks. Two test procedures are used. First, testing for correlation between beliefs about the contribution of others and own behavior and second, experimentally varying the beliefs about others' behavior. Using the latter approach, I find the share of subjects giving a contribution to be significantly greater in the group receiving information about others' behavior than in the group that does not. Regression analysis cannot reject that subjects are affected by social comparisons and express a behavior classified as conditional cooperation.

Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (38)

Downloads: (external link)
http://s3.amazonaws.com/fieldexperiments-papers2/papers/00268.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:feb:natura:00268

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Natural Field Experiments from The Field Experiments Website
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Francesca Pagnotta ().