D6.1 – Behavioural Games for Preference Elicitation
Authors/Creators
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1.
University of Reading
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2.
University of Turin
Description
In IN-HABIT, each city aims to improve health and well-being using different solutions. Each of the envisioned solutions can be considered as common-pool resources which will deplete if they are not properly managed by citizens. We have designed and run experiments with the aim to elicit and understand social preferences, particularly willingness to cooperate and contribute to a common pool resource in each of the four different cities. This document reports the results of the first phase of public good experiments.
Public good experiments are a type of economic experiment that investigates individuals' behaviour in situations where they can contribute to a public good. The classic public goods game involves participants deciding how much of their resources to contribute to a common pool, with the option to free-ride and benefit from others' contributions without contributing themselves.
In our design, participants are placed in the context of investing into a common-pool resource as part of a group of 5 participants. They are given a fixed endowment of 100 tokens, from which they have to decide how much to contribute to the common-pool resource. Whatever goes into the common pool from each contributor is multiplied and then split equally among group members irrespective of the amount contributed. At the end, individuals’ final pay-off is the sum of what they kept and the equal share of the common-pool resource. The game is repeated for three rounds, whereby, in the second and third round, participants take into consideration what other participants have contributed in previous rounds. This allows us to assess whether the willingness to contribute to a common pool evolves over time as participants are aware of what others have contributed to: do they follow what others have done, do they compensate for a depleting common pool, or do they behave regardless of what others ‘ contribution has been in previous rounds?
Each city then selected one of their solutions to be the basis of the context for their respective game. More specifically, Cordoba (WP1) chose a multifunctional green space, Riga (WP2) chose a community stage, Lucca (WP3) chose Animal-Assisted Interventions, and Nitra (WP4) chose a picnic meadow. Moreover, we aim to assess whether cooperation would differ if the common-pool resource would have more targeted beneficiaries, such as vulnerable groups, rather than be seen as beneficial just to the general public as whole. Each city identified a vulnerable group in line with the local context: Cordoba chose Las Palmeras residents (socio-economic background), Riga chose sexual minorities, Lucca chose the elderly and Nitra chose Roma people.
Overall, across all cities, we find that the average contribution to a common pool is quite high, around 75, compared to what is usually known (around 50) for this kind of experiment. Moreover, there is a general decreasing pattern of individual contributions with the level of the group contribution. The lower the group contribution, the fewer participants contribute. So, on average, participants are conditional cooperators and tend to punish free-riders. But this behaviour does not depend on the identity of the beneficiary of the common-pool resources as both treatment groups exhibit this same pattern.
Across all cities, although there does not seem to be general differences between participants depending on the identity of the beneficiary of the common-pool resources, we can notice differences when group participants are contributing the least (stages 2c, 3d and 3e). Participants contribute more in this situation when the common-pool resource benefits the vulnerable group than when the common-pool resource benefits the general population. They still decrease their contribution compared to higher group contributions, but much less than when common-pool resources benefit the general population.
Always across cities, when looking at differences by gender, men and women behave very differently. Women tend to reduce their contribution less than men when the contribution of others decreases. Men, on the contrary, tend to reduce their contribution when the group contributions are the highest. It could be that men either favour their own interest and free-ride if there is a good opportunity to do so, or that they decide to step aside if the common-pool resource already gets a large support.
That being said, there are relevant differences in overall contributions, gender gaps and strategicbehavioursbetweenthefourcities. Forinstance,consideringoverallcontributions,in Riga and Cordoba, the contribution to the common pool is overall higher when this benefits the general population rather than the specific vulnerable group; in Lucca it is the opposite, while in Nitra there is overall no difference and participants to the experiment contribute overall the same amount whether the project benefits the general population or the targeted vulnerable group. We also found a range of different gender gaps in willingness to contribute in the four cities, which we report in detail in the Results section of this report.
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D6.1 Behavioural Games for Preference Elicitation.pdf
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