Economic and hypothetical dictator game experiments: Incentive effects at the individual level

Abstract

The paper compares behavior in economic dictator game experiments played with actual money (amounts given by "dictator" subjects) with behavior in hypothetical dictator game experiments where subjects indicate what they would give, although no money is actually exchanged. The average amounts transferred in the two experiments are remarkably similar. Moreover, we uncover meaningful individual differences in real and hypothetical allocations and demonstrate the importance of two personality traits-agreeableness and extraversion-in reconciling them. We conclude that extraverts are "all talk;" agreeable subjects are "for real."

Imagine Being a Nice Guy: A Note on Hypothetical vs. Incentivized Social Preferences

“…Pooling generous and strongly generous subjects results in a fraction of 62% in the incentivized and 48% in the hypothetical treatment; yet this difference is not significant (Fisher's exact test, p = 0.10, two-sided). This pattern is in line with Ben-Ner et al (2008), who also found insignificantly greater generosity for real rather than hypothetical choices in DGs.…”

“…Amir et al (2012) reported that 1$ incentives in an online DG significantly decreased average offers compared to a no-stakes DG. On the contrary, Ben-Ner et al (2008) showed that dictators facing decisions involving real money were slightly more generous compared with participants considering hypothetical money, but this difference was not significant in statistical and economic terms, even after controlling for subject-specific characteristics. Table 1 displays how the pooled decisions map into different categories of social preferences.…”

Latent variables and propensity score matching: a simulation study with application to data from the Programme for International Student Assessment in Poland

“…In educational studies, a number of works demonstrate the importance of student attitudes or latent family characteristics (OECD 2009;Jakubowski and Pokropek 2009). Behavioral economics often looks into the ways personality traits or attitudes affect people's behavior, for example, in experiments analyzing risk aversion or economic preferences (see Fairlie and Holleran 2012;Grabner et al 2009;Ovchinnikova et al 2009;Ben-Ner et al 2008).…”

Inequality aversion, social discount, and time discount rates

“…Recent research has indicated, however, that the presence or absence of an incentive is unrelated to the outcomes observed in dictator games (Ben-Nera et al 2008, Engel 2010.…”