Estimating the causal effect of beliefs on contributions in repeated public good games

Smith, Alexander

doi:10.1007/s10683-012-9345-5

Cited by 49 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…In unconditional public-goods games, individuals appear to still conditionally cooperate, by correlating their contributions with their stated beliefs about their groupmates (2,54). Therefore, at the same time players made their contribution decision, we asked them what they expected their groupmates would do.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conditional cooperation and confusion in public-goods experiments

Burton-Chellew

Mouden

West

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

117

134

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Economic experiments are often used to study if humans altruistically value the welfare of others. A canonical result from public-good games is that humans vary in how they value the welfare of others, dividing into fair-minded conditional cooperators, who match the cooperation of others, and selfish noncooperators. However, an alternative explanation for the data are that individuals vary in their understanding of how to maximize income, with misunderstanding leading to the appearance of cooperation. We show that (i) individuals divide into the same behavioral types when playing with computers, whom they cannot be concerned with the welfare of; (ii) behavior across games with computers and humans is correlated and can be explained by variation in understanding of how to maximize income; (iii) misunderstanding correlates with higher levels of cooperation; and (iv) standard control questions do not guarantee understanding. These results cast doubt on certain experimental methods and demonstrate that a common assumption in behavioral economics experiments, that choices reveal motivations, will not necessarily hold.altruism | strategy method | inequity aversion | reciprocity | social preferences

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conditional cooperation and confusion in public-goods experiments

Burton-Chellew

Mouden

West

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

117

134

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“…Social cooperation, its evolution and stability can be understood from a number of perspectives: social value orientation (see Balliet et al, 2009); social norms (e.g., Buckholtz and Marois, 2012;Fehr and Fischbacher, 2004); group bias (e.g., Dorrough et al, 2015;McAuliffe and Dunham, 2016); conditional cooperation or reciprocity (e.g., Kocher et al, 2008;Fischbacher and Gaechter, 2010;Smith, 2013); context-specificity (e.g., Rand and Nowak, 2013); and so on.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cooperation and Optimism in a Social Dilemma

Oyediran

Rivas

Coulson

et al. 2018

Bulletin of Econ Res

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“…Both literatures contain rich sets of observations that are consistent with a causal influence of beliefs on actions, but the endogeneity of beliefs and actions is rarely addressed in the analyses. 7 8 7 Notable exceptions are the papers by van Soest (2008, 2011) and who estimate structural econometric models that include covariance between beliefs and actions, and Smith (2013) who studies experimental public goods games and uses lagged actions by the opponent as instruments for stated beliefs. Bellemare, Kröger and van Soest study first-order beliefs of proposers (2008) and responders (2011) in the ultimatum game.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Smith's (2013) IV regressions in public goods games also point at a substantial endogeneity of actions and beliefs. Our results indicate only a milder endogeneity problem in the trust game.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%