The experimental search for free riders: Some reflections and observations

Thomas McCaleb and Richard Wagner

Public Choice, 1985, vol. 47, issue 3, 479-490

Abstract: The presence of the incentive to free ride in ‘pure situations’ has not heretofore been contested, and we would have expected that choice settings could be designed in which something very close to full free riding would emerge. As K-W correctly claim, however, this conjecture has not yet been tested. The successful design and conduct of such an experiment would offer confirmation of what ‘everyone knows’. On the other hand, the results of the recent experiments in free riding reviewed here cast some doubt on the ability of such experiments to generate full and complete free riding behavior. Instead, what these experiments show is that as the experiment is more carefully designed to enhance the incentives to free ride, it becomes less and less like real world choice settings. We think that experimental studies on free riding can provide valuable evidence on a subject that might otherwise not be amenable to empirical research. Results from experiments conducted in ‘purified’ settings, however, still leave us a long way from understanding the social processes through which real world choices are made. A greater understanding of these processes requires an examination of the evolution of the institutions of social choice to determine why the relatively uncontaminated choice settings represented by the recent experimental research have often not survived the test of time while the relatively contaminated settings explored by others seem to have greater survival value. Copyright Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 1985

Date: 1985
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DOI: 10.1007/BF00182149

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