Abstract
This paper presents evidence from a lab experiment investigating whether the preeminence of conditional cooperators in studies using the method of Fischbacher, Gächter and Fehr (2001, Economics Letters) is sensitive to changes in the experimental frame. The treatments vary the framing such that the salience of conditionality to subjects is reduced. The results show that these manipulations affect the distribution of elicited types. However, there is no evidence that the framing of Fischbacher et al. overestimates the fraction of conditional cooperators compared to the other frames considered in the experiment. Furthermore, this research finds that conditional contributions elicited using the Fischbacher et al. (2001) frame are the most consistent with contributions in a one-shot public good game.
Highlights
Motivated by the observation that “people cooperate much more than predicted by standard economic theory assuming rational and selfish individuals”, Fischbacher, Gächter and Fehr (2001, p. 397, FGF) [1], in a seminal paper, posed the following question: Are people conditionally cooperative? That is, are they willing to cooperate with others if others cooperate? To answer it, they introduced a method for eliciting participants’ strategy profiles in an incentive-compatible way, using a variant of the linear public good game
This paper presents the results from a lab experiment exploring whether the extent of conditional cooperation in the existing studies is sensitive to changes in the experimental frame
The discussion of the data is divided into three sections, one for each of the hypotheses regarding the impact of framing: (i) on the preeminence of conditional cooperators (Section 3.1); (ii) on the levels of noise in the contributions schedules (Section 3.2); and (iii) on the consistency between contribution schedules and one-shot contributions
Summary
Motivated by the observation that “people cooperate much more than predicted by standard economic theory assuming rational and selfish individuals”, Fischbacher, Gächter and Fehr (2001, p. 397, FGF) [1], in a seminal paper, posed the following question: Are people conditionally cooperative? That is, are they willing to cooperate with others if others cooperate? To answer it, they introduced a method for eliciting participants’ strategy profiles in an incentive-compatible way, using a variant of the linear public good game. This paper presents the results from a lab experiment exploring whether the extent of conditional cooperation in the existing studies is sensitive to changes in the experimental frame. A notable feature of the FGF method is that the possible contributions of others are presented in a table: (i) simultaneously; and (ii) in an ascending order (see Appendix A). This (double) ordering arguably increases the salience of conditionality. Knowing whether framing can affect the estimated fraction of conditional cooperators is potentially important as it could imply that previous studies may have overestimated the extent to which conditional cooperation can account for contributions in finitely repeated (e.g., Fischbacher and Gächter, 2010 [10]; Gächter, Kölle and Quercia 2017) [11] and one-shot public good games (e.g., Fischbacher, Gächter and Quercia, 2012 [4])..
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