To Tender or Not to Tender? Deliberate and Exogenous Sunk Costs in a Public Good Game

Abstract

In an experimental study, we compare individual willingness to cooperate in a public good game after an initial team contest phase. While players in the treatment setup make a conscious decision on how much to invest in the contest, this decision is exogenously imposed on players in the control setup. As such, both groups of players incur sunk costs and enter the public good game with different wealth levels. Our results indicate that the way these sunk costs have been accrued matters especially for groups on the losing side of the contest: Given the same level of sunk costs, contributions to the public good are lower for groups which failed to be successful in the preceding between-group contest. Furthermore, this detrimental effect is more pronounced for individuals who play a contest with deliberate contributions before.

Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability

“…Furthermore, the marginal effects reported in our central results are not affected by controlling for the share of women in the session (the coefficient on female is 0.113 rather than the 0.111 seen in Table 2, column 1), nor is the coefficient on the session share of women statistically significant (coefficient −0.148, p = 0.615). 11 The mean age of men and women is not significantly different (18.99 versus 18.79, two-sided t-test p = 0.319). Similarly using a Fisher's exact test there is no significant gender difference in the distribution of age Upon entering the lab, participants were seated in a pre-marked cubicle, asked to provide informed consent, and given instructions.…”