Behavioral spillovers in local public good provision: An experimental study

Abstract

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Does heterogeneity spoil the basket? The role of productivity and feedback information on public good provision

“…This shows that participants correlate how they play their two, structurally independent, games and, therefore, that the two games are behaviorally linked due to intra-personal behavioral spillovers. This evidence confirms that behavioral spillovers found in the baseline, homogeneous, treatment implemented in Angelovski et al (2017) exist also in a more heterogeneous setting.…”

“…We study purely behavioral spillovers and test their robustness by inducing experimental heterogeneity of group members in the asymmetric treatment considered by Angelovski et al (2017). Two "Bad" Apples differ from the six other group members either by larger (asymmetric) freeriding incentives or by not receiving information feedback.…”

“…In a companion study (Angelovski et al, 2017) we have shown that independent local games are played in a correlated way even in the presence of asymmetry, namely that one confronts different (freeriding) incentives in one's left and right bilateral interactions, which is a likely feature in most field situations and a potential obstacle of behavioral spillovers. However, it has done so by maintaining the homogeneity of all group members, a frequent assumption in experimental research but one questioning the external validity of many findings 1 Most of this literature focus on how individual facing multiple independent games in sequence develop and apply common behavior across them instead of applying distinct strategies in each game. Falk et al (2013), instead, investigate social interaction effects when two identical public good games are played simultaneously with different opponents.…”

“…Savikin and Shemereta, 2013, Bednar et al 2012, Cason et al, 2012, Cason and Gangadharan, 2013and Falk et al, 2013 for coordination and competitive games; Bernasconi et al, 2009 andFalk et al, 2013 for public good games). 1 However most of the existing studies assume symmetry and homogeneity. This simplifies the experimental setting but hardly resembles behavior and performance in the field where social interactions crucially depend on the heterogeneity of group members and on their relative position.…”

“…Distance variation of "Bad" Apples distinguishing group members' types: "Bad"Apples (BA), their neighbors (DN) and indirect neighbors (IN)"Bad"Apples that stems from the dataset of the previous experiment reported inAngelovski et al (2017).…”