Big experimenter is watching you! Anonymity and prosocial behavior in the laboratory

Details

Serval ID
serval:BIB_A9C4D76D346F
Type
Article: article from journal or magazin.
Collection
Publications
Institution
Title
Big experimenter is watching you! Anonymity and prosocial behavior in the laboratory
Journal
Games and Economic Behavior
Author(s)
Barmettler  F., Fehr  E., Zehnder  C.
ISSN
0899-8256
Publication state
Published
Issued date
05/2012
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Volume
75
Number
1
Pages
17-34
Language
english
Abstract
Researchers have demonstrated that the presence of people with social preferences has important economic implications. However, the empirical basis of this research relies to a large extent on experiments that do not provide anonymity between experimenter and subject. It has been argued that this lack of experimenter-subject anonymity may create selfish incentives to engage in seemingly other-regarding behavior. If this were the case, these experiments would overestimate the importance of social preferences. Previous studies provide mixed results and methodological differences within and across studies make it difficult to isolate the impact of experimenter-subject anonymity. In this paper we use a novel procedure that allows us to examine the impact of the exact same ceteris-paribus variation in anonymity on behavior in three of the most commonly used games in the social preference literature. We find that the introduction of experimenter-subject anonymity has no significant effect in any of the three games.
Keywords
Scrutiny, Anonymity, Laboratory experiments, Prosocial behavior
Web of science
Create date
06/09/2011 21:38
Last modification date
21/08/2019 6:14
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