Public-good experiments with large groups in a large virtual laboratory
Weimann J.*, Brosig J.**, Hennig-Schmidt H.***, Keser, C.****, Stahr Ch.*
Duration: 2010 - 2013
Experiments on the private provision of public goods have long been the subject of experimental economic research. The reason for this strong interest is the fact that many real allocation problems can be characterized as public goods problems. An important example is the current environmental debate, in which public goods such as the climate system play a central role. In the experimental investigation of such goods, however, a central methodological problem arises: Controlled laboratory experiments are necessarily experiments in small groups of 4 to 10 players. However, real public goods problems affect very large groups. If the disbursement function used to implement public goods in the laboratory is applied to such large groups, it can be seen that in large groups there is a close relationship between the N-person-prisoner dilemma and the dictator game. This is lost in the usual small group experiments. It is therefore only possible to a limited extent to make statements on the basis of these experiments about the behaviour in real public-good problems. The literature on the dictator game makes it clear that the behaviour of dictators depends very much on the special institutional conditions set by experimental design. For this reason, experiments are proposed in which several laboratories are linked together in an Internet-based virtual laboratory in which laboratory experiments with large groups are possible. In this way, a payout situation is to be created that corresponds to the real public-good problems and allows to study the behavior in the resulting quasi dictator game.
* Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg
** University of Duisburg-Essen
*** Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-University Bonn
**** Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Funding: DFG