‘Pocket and Pot’: Hypothetical Bias in a No-Free-Riding Public Contribution Game

Tatiana Gubanova, Wiktor Adamowicz and Melville McMillan

No 49318, 2009 Annual Meeting, July 26-28, 2009, Milwaukee, Wisconsin from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: Hypothetical bias arises when values which people say they place on a good or service differ systematically from the values people reveal for the same good or service through actual, binding economic transactions. Studies of hypothetical bias with respect to public goods often use charitable contributions or other relatively unique goods and these studies employ a variety of mechanisms to elicit the stated and revealed values. This study proposes the inclusion of a free-rider barring random dictatorship mechanism in the standard public contribution game to investigate the issue of bias when a public good involves immediate monetary returns to subjects. Steps are taken to make the game have the look and feel of a real-world tradeoff between private investment and public good provision. Data for the experiment were collected using a sample of students from the University of Alberta. A statistically significant negative hypothetical bias is found for the first hypothetical and the first real rounds of the game. The bias decays in subsequent round pairs, oscillating around zero.

Keywords: Resource; /Energy; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43
Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-neu and nep-pbe
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Working Paper: 'Pocket and Pot': Hypothetical Bias in a No-Free-Riding Public Contribution Game (2009)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea09:49318

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.49318

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