The Not so Gentle Push: Behavioral Spillovers and Policy Instruments

Abstract

We examine whether spillovers of pro-social behavior depend on how behavioral changes are induced. We conduct a large experiment using economic games, with a Dictator Game (DG) followed by either an identical game or a Prisoner's Dilemma (PD). We influence initial behavior through widely used policy instruments, either behaviorally informed (default, social norms) or with an economic/regulatory rationale (incentives, regulation). Our results provide evidence of positive spillovers to subsequent economic games (which are not treated), but only for the traditional economic/regulatory interventions and within the same game type. Specifically, inducing higher giving in the first stage leads to subsequent higher altruism in the DG, but not to more cooperation in the PD. The carry over of pro-social behavior appears to be driven by an anchoring on the initial donation. We also measure observers' beliefs and we find that these results MotivationEvaluation of policy interventions is widely recognized as a valuable tool to inform policy design ([87];[1]). Generally, rigorous evidence, on which the relevance, efficiency and effectiveness of policies is based, does not extend beyond the specific scope of the intervention under study. However, the extent to which the effects of public policy interventions spill across contexts can greatly influence their evaluation.Pro-social behavior is one realm where the presence of spillovers is likely to be particularly relevant. Individuals interact strategically in many different settings and the same normative value can influence behavior in different contexts and groups. For instance, evidence from economic experiments shows that previously established cooperative precedents lead to higher cooperation in subsequent games ([60]; [30]; [17]). The presence of spillovers of pro-social behavior has large policy implications as well:for instance, a key policy question in the environmental economics literature is whether interventions that foster cooperative norms in the conservation of a specific environmental resource have positive or negative spillovers to other pro-environmental behaviors ([32, 90]).The sign and magnitude of policy spillovers may depend on the instrument used to induce behavioral changes. In recent years, innovative policy interventions based on the insights of social psychology and behavioral economics have attracted increasing interest by legislators. These policy interventions complement traditional ones based on economic incentives or regulation, and have now seen application in many fields, including to a large extent pro-social and environmental behavior ([2]; [18,86]).However, while comparisons of traditional and behavioral policy instruments exist in the literature ([53]; [36]), little is known about how treatment effects would carry forward outside the specific area they were designed for [32]. Moreover, most existing studies compare only few policy instruments within the same design, and, to our knowledge, no assessment of the relative effectiven...

To know or not to know? Looking at payoffs signals selfish behavior, but it does not actually mean so

“…For example, a risk-averse receiver who believes that the decision maker is going to choose Option A with probability 0.5 and Option B with probability 0.5 would prefer to bet on Option B rather than Option A, because the two bets have the same expected value (20c), but betting on Option B has an higher certain reward. We refer to d'Adda, Capraro and Tavoni (2015) and Dufwenberg and Gneezy (2000) for related discussions.…”