Salience in Public Goods Games

Deborah Kistler, Su Nanxu and Christian Thoeni
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Christian Thöni

Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'économie from Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, Département d’économie

Abstract: We study the effect of three salience manipulations on cooperation in a standard public goods game. A standard social preferences model enriched by salience weights provides hypotheses about the expected effects of our salience manipulations. We test these predictions in a laboratory experiment using different techniques to manipulate the salience of either the highest or lowest contribution in the group. We find no systematic effect of the salience manipulation on cooperation,even though our regression analysis suggests that subjects’contributions are positively linked to the salient contribution. This is because subjects systematically reduce their contributions in the maximum condition relative the minimum condition. These two effects offset each other, resulting in contribution levels which are surprisingly unresponsive to our salience manipulations.

Keywords: salience; inequality aversion; experiment; public goods game (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 D83 D91 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pp.
Date: 2022-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-gth
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lau:crdeep:22.10

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