Journal
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
Volume 88, Issue 7-8, Pages 1605-1623Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE SA
DOI: 10.1016/S0047-2727(03)00040-9
Keywords
public goods; fund-raising; economic efficiency
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Laboratory researchers in economics assiduously protect the confidentiality of subjects. Why? Presumably because they fear that the social consequences of identifying subjects and their choices would significantly alter the economic incentives of the game. But these may be the same social effects that institutions, like charitable fund-raising, are manipulating to help overcome free riding and to promote economic efficiency. We present an experiment that unmasks subjects in a systematic and controlled way. We show that, as intuition suggests, identifying subjects has significant effects. Surprisingly, we found that two supplemental conditions meant to mimic common fund-raising practices actually had the most dramatic influences on behavior. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available