Individualism as a predictor of economic decision-making:
A public goods game with Dutch high school students
BSc Thesis by
Tomek Dabrowski
under the supervision of
Jindi Zheng, MSc
Faculty of Economics and Business Section Experimental & Political Economics
University of Amsterdam
Abstract: Current research shows that real life economic decision-making deviates from standard economic theory. Moreover, factors like culture can have an influence on how actual behaviour differs from the rational decision-making. To see how culture in the form of degree of individualism, and also demographics like gender, age and income affect altruism in a public good game setting, an experiment was conducted with Dutch high school students of which part was of non-Dutch origin. Participants had to decide how much to contribute to a public good, where social welfare would be highest if all contributed their entire endowment but personal gain would be largest when the participant contributed nothing. Culture was measured according to national cultural background scored per country by Hofstede’s individualism dimension, and according to the degree of personal individualism based on a questionnaire. Results show that national culture has a significant effect on the level of average contributions, where subjects from highly individualistic countries like the Netherlands contribute less to a public good. Furthermore it emerges from this study that females contribute more to a public good than males. (JEL C72; C91; H41)
Tomek Dabrowski*
Amsterdam, June 30, 2014
Keywords: Public goods game; experimental economics; behavioural economics; individualism; self-interest; cooperation
1. Introduction
Since the fields of behavioural economics and game theory have transformed into integral parts of economics, experimental economists looking into various topics have found evidence that actual economic decision-making is not always based on rationality, which often coincides with self-interest, as predicted by standard economic theory (Camerer, 2003). Rather, individuals make decisions based on social, psychological and emotional factors besides their rational reasoning. An example of such evidence is the paper “Economic man” in cross-cultural
perspective (Henrich et al., 2005) where the behaviour in ultimatum, dictator and public goods games in a range
of small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions is studied. Their findings suggest that self-interest cannot explain the decision-making in all of the societies studied, and an even more substantial behavioural variability across social groups is found than in previous research that was mostly done
*
The author is an Economics student at the University of Amsterdam with student ID 10178902. Special thanks to: Jindi
Zheng for her guidance and supervision, as well as to Teunis Bloothoofd for his help and to Paco Prins, Otto Kelderman and Ton van Drielen for supplying students for the experiment, and also tot Rachel Bodsky from Moblab for answering all questions about the process of setting up an experiment through the website. Contact: tomekdabro@gmail.com
with university students.
While by now it is clear that economic decision-making is not solely a product of rationality, it is not easy to determine which additional factors have an influence on the process of decision-making and in what way. Multiple ways exist in which there can be discriminated between people according to certain characteristics: besides fairly simple attributes like gender, age and welfare also more complicated factors such as social environment, cultural background and emotional state can have a, sometimes surprising or unpredictable, effect on decisions made by people. There are various cases that demonstrate these effects. For one, a famous
experiment done by Gneezy and Rustichini (2000) in Israeli day cares where may parents came late when picking up their children shows that fines imposed by them actually increased the number of parents coming late instead of decreasing it, because they saw it as a payment for coming late rather than a punishment. Another example is an experiment showing that, while higher rewards increase performance, excessive rewards can result in lower performance (Ariely et al., 2009). This is counter-intuitive, as theoretically the positive effect of a reward on performance should not have a ceiling at which the sign of the effect flips. Cultural background has also been shown to affect decision-making in an interesting and often unpredictable way, as was described among others by Henrich et al. (2005).
Cultural differences between people have been extensively studied by Hofstede, who defines culture as “the collective programming of the mind distinguishing the members of one group or category of people from another”, where “category” can refer to nations, regions within or across nations, ethnicities, religions, occupations, organizations, or the genders (Hofstede et al., 2010). These differences can be used as a way to differentiate between people according to certain characteristics, which are part of their culture. In order to do so, Hofstede created four dimensions across which cultures can be ranked from 1 to 100:
• Power Distance: the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally;
• Uncertainty Avoidance: deals with a society's tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity;
• Individualism and its opposite collectivism: the degree to which individuals are integrated into groups; • Masculinity and its opposite femininity: refers to the distribution of emotional roles between the
genders, which is another fundamental issue for any society to which a range of solutions are found (Hofstede et al., 2010).
Of these four dimensions, the individualism-collectivism dimension has become a standard instrument in cross-cultural research and is used for measuring cross-cultural values in various forms of Hofstede’s version in more than two thirds of all research (Taras et al., 2014). Moreover, recent work concerning the effects of culture in the workplace based on more than 500 empirical studies reported than the individualism-collectivism dimension accounts for about 88% of all reported effects of cultural values in the empirical cross-cultural literature (Taras,
Kirkman & Steel, 2010).
In order to widen the research on deviations of economic decision-making from standard economic theory, this paper describes a cross-cultural study based on Hofstede’s individualism-collectivism dimension measured on two levels: as a cultural trait measured by Hofstede, and as a personal trait according to the
vertical-horizontal individualism-collectivism scale by Triandis and Gelfand (1998) measured through a series of questions. The former allows for analysis of participant’s behaviour based on the culture of the country they and their parents are from and the country they were raised in, while the latter gives the opportunity to differentiate between acceptance of inequality (vertical) or emphasis on equality (horizontal) of an individual beyond the degree of individualism.
However, it is not easy to discover in what way behaviour is affected by culture. Besides behaviour being often unpredictable, the manner of studying how culture affects economic decision-making is not straightforward. The Israeli day cares mentioned before could not simply ask parents if they would be on time when a fine would be imposed: they had to impose a fine and see what the results would be. Similarly, people in the study by Ariely et al. wouldn’t be able to define what level of reward would motivate them to perform and what level would be too high: this too had to be inferred from an experiment. A controlled experimental environment provides with a way to test a hypothesis by selecting or dividing people according to certain characteristics, collecting information about these characteristics and manipulating the situation the test subjects encounter in order to get the desired knowledge. Game theory can be used as a basis for such an experiment in order to create a situation where strategic decisions have to be made; often these situations are simplifications of real-life choices.
This is the case with the public goods game, which shows how people behave when individual and group-interests conflict. In such a game, each player receives an endowment of which a part can be invested in a public good that is shared by everyone and yields a certain rate of return. The payoff-maximizing outcome (the rational and selfish choice) is to contribute nothing, but if everyone would contribute their whole endowment, each player’s earnings are highest. This game models a situation such as pollution of the environment, in which one player’s action imposes a harmful externality on innocent parties, or the production of a public utility such as a school that non-contributing ‘free riders’ cannot easily be excluded from (Camerer, 2003). When played with students, contributions to the public good average between 40% and 60% of the endowment, although there is a wide variance, with most contributing either everything or nothing (Henrich & Smith, 2004). When a public goods game is played repeatedly with the same partners, the level of contributions declines towards zero and results in most subjects not contributing to the public good at all (Fehr & Gächter, 2002).
It is interesting to see that the individualism-collectivism dimension as a personality trait might have an influence on the decisions people make in the public goods game. “On the individualist side we find societies in
which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after her/himself and her/his
immediate family. On the collectivist side, we find societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, often extended families (with uncles, aunts and grandparents) that continue protecting them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty” (Hofstede et al., 2010). This suggests that individualistic people might tend to contribute less to a public good in this game than collectivistic people. Findings of Earley and Gibson (1998) based on an analysis of previous research suggest that collectivists are generally more cooperative than individuals, and while collectivistic groups working on team goals tended to perform better than when working on individual goals, with individualist groups team goals often resulted in free riding. Also, according to Wagner (1995) individualists who feel independent and self-reliant are less apt to engage in cooperative behaviour, and collectivists who feel interdependent and reliant on groups are more likely to behave cooperatively. Again, these claims support the intuition of individualists contributing less to a public good.
The aim of this paper is to study the influence of the degree of individualism as a cultural and personal trait as well as gender, age and welfare on contribution levels in a public goods game with Dutch high school students. According to Hofstede the Netherlands has a score of 80 (out of 100) on the individualism scale, meaning it scores higher than most countries on the individualism scale. However, as the Netherlands is a multicultural society, there are a lot of people from different origin who were partly raised other cultures with different values. This creates the perfect opportunity to compare Dutch and non-Dutch students on the level of contributions to a public good. The study described in this paper will strife to provide evidence in favour of the intuition that collectivists contribute more to the public good in a public goods game as opposed to
individualists.
2. Experimental setup
The subjects who participated in the public goods game studied in this paper came from three classes of 16 to 20 students aged 14-18 from the Scholengemeenschap Lelystad or SGL (Schooling Community Lelystad) in the Netherlands. The classes recruited were: a 5 VWO (pre-university secondary education) class; a 3 HAVO (higher general secondary education, pre-university of applied sciences education, one level below VWO) class; and a 4 HAVO class. Taken together these classes yield a subject pool of 52 students of which 22 were in some part foreign, and 10 students were classified as non-Dutch (this process will be explained in the experimental results, part 3 of this paper).
In order to motivate the participants, they were told that at the end of the experiment four people would be randomly chosen and paid out a cash reward between 4 and 22 euros based on their performance in the game. This was done to induce the correct motivations for the subjects: everyone participating had an equal chance of
winning money; even when they did not all perform as well.
The participants received written instructions at the beginning of the experiment, after which the instructor answered any questions. The subjects took part in the experiment through the portal of Moblab (www.moblab.com), a website which allows for setting up a classroom game in order to teach abstract concepts in economics, political business and psychology by making use of fairly simple and understandable situations. The public goods game was set up as follows: the students were told they received an endowment of $ 50 each round, of which they could contribute a part to cleaning the pond in the school’s yard. Their winnings would be calculated using the formula:
Endowment + Rate of return x Sum of contributions – Contribution = Payoff;
where the endowment was $ 50 each round and the rate of return was 40%. The students were randomly grouped in ‘societies’ of four people with whom they would play the game. They did not receive information about who was in their society, and they also weren’t allowed to communicate. The participants played a trail round after which the last questions were answered, and after this the actual game consisting of 20 rounds was played. At the end of the game, in each class 4 random students were selected who received their reward based on their total payoff across 20 rounds, according to the exchange rate $ 100 = € 1: so for instance a student with total earnings of $ 1495 received € 14,95. In the end, 12 students were rewarded with an average reward of around €12,50 each.
After playing the public goods game, the students were asked to fill out two surveys. The first focused on demographic characteristics: gender, age and earnings, as well as questions about the origin of the students and his parents (see Appendix I). These questions would later be used to determine an average score of cultural individualism based on Hofstede’s scoring of country culture. The second survey consisted of sixteen questions used for determining the level of horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism based on research by Triandis and Gelfand (1998)(see Appendix II). This survey was mostly used for determining a score on the individualism-collectivism scale, and if necessary offer the opportunity to discriminate between horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism as described in the introduction.
3. Experimental results
To offer some insight in the differences between classes, Table I with descriptive data allows for comparing the 5 VWO, 3 HAVO and 4 HAVO classes. Table II shows how the three classes compare statistics-wise when looking at first-round, last-round and overall average contributions.
As shown in Table I, the average age jumps approximately one year corresponding to the appropriate age group for each class. The male-female division is quite equal in each class. Yet, when looking at the cultural roots of the subjects, 15 (68,2%) of the 22 students who had foreign roots in some way or another (for instance a father born in Scotland but with the Dutch nationality) were male while only 7 (31,8%) were female. However, this way a lot of students were included who were Dutch for the main part. To fully differentiate between Dutch and non-Dutch students, the criterion was set that a student had to have an average cultural individualism score of at most 70 (so 10 point below the Dutch score of 80) to be classified as non-Dutch. This score is the result of taking the average of questions 3 up to 9 from questionnaire 1 (see Appendix I). In this way, 10 non-Dutch students were identified of which half was male and half female. Furthermore, average earnings are somewhat higher in the 4 HAVO class than would be expected when looking at the other two classes.
With respect to culture according to Hofstede’s individualism dimension, the 5 VWO class shows little cultural diversity with a score close to 80 and a small standard deviation. The 3 HAVO class on the other hand has an average score of 70 with a larger standard deviation and is therefore much more culturally diverse. The 4 HAVO class fits somewhere in between the other two classes. When looking at the personal individualism-collectivism score based on the questionnaire by Trandis and Gelfand (Appendix II, questionnaire 2), all three classes show results slightly favouring collectivism (the scale theoretically runs from -64 to 64, where negative scores are in favour of collectivism). However, in all classes the standard deviation is large, indicating a lot of differences between subjects. The horizontal-vertical attitude scores show that all classes favour a horizontal society. Again, the standard deviations are substantial, though smaller than with the individualism-collectivism scale.
Table I: Descriptive data
5 VWO 3 HAVO 4 HAVO Total
Number of subjects 16 20 16 52
Average age 16,93 years 14,9 years 16,19 years 15,92 years
Percentage of females 50% 45% 56,25% 50%
Average monthly earnings €104,76 €69,15 €189,44 €118,85
Students of non-Dutch origin (10 of 52) 0% (0) 25% (5) 31,25% (5) 19,23% Average cultural individualism (S.E.) 77,99 (2,75) 70,37 (16,14) 72,09 (11,05) 73,25 (12,08) Average personal individualism–collectivism (S.E.) – 2,38 (14,19) – 4 (12,85) – 1,31 (13,85) – 2,67 (13,36) Average personal horizontal–vertical attitude (S.E.) 11,63 (8,26) 4,4 (6,25) 3,44 (10,36) 6,33 (8,893)
Figure 1 and Table II show that average contributions fall from almost $20 of the disposable $50, or approximately 40%, in the first round, to an average of nearly $7 or 14% in the final round. This is slightly
below averages found by Henrich and Smith (2004), however the data also shows a wide variance (see Table II). Average contributions from the entire game come in at around 15-25% of the endowments. In the final rounds a lot of people chose to contribute nothing, though a few still contributed a small or sometimes even significant part of their endowment. This is supported by the high standard deviations of the average contributions in both first and last rounds. Furthermore, the data shows that in the first round subjects in 3 HAVO contributed most, while subjects from 5 VWO contributed least; 4 HAVO was in between. In the final round 3 HAVO still contributed most, but the average contributions were much less apart across the three classes. From the average contributions as well as the graph it can be seen that students from 5 VWO decreased their contribution quite soon and then held at a low level, while the other two classes decreased contributions more gradually during the entire game.
Figure 1: Average contributions per round, sorted by class.
Table II: First-round, last-round and average contribution statistics
First round Last round Average contribution
Mean S.E. Mean S.E. Mean S.E.
5 VWO 14,25 8,2664 6,1875 13,7996 7,3938 4,7387
3 HAVO 23,25 10,6814 8,85 14,6513 11,665 4,5236
4 HAVO 17,375 11,8821 4,75 10,3698 12,5063 7,7269
Total 18,6731 10,9091 6,7692 13,0649 10,6096 6,0496
Notes: Standard errors in parenthesis, mean contributions in dollars, maximum contribution possible was $50 in each round.
When looking at the origin of students based on the cultural individualism scores by Hofstede, 42 students are Dutch or for the main part Dutch (Figure 2a, left), while 10 students have a score of 70 or lower and
qualify as non-Dutch students (Figure 2a, right). The figures show the fraction of students in each subgroup based on level of average contributions. One can see that of the Dutch students on the left about 50% contributes more than $10 on average, while of the non-Dutch students on the right this amounts to about 70%.
Figure 2a: Average contributions of Dutch (left) and non-Dutch (right) students In Table III it is shown in what way total average
contributions are correlated with the instruments gender, age, income, the cultural individualism score and the personal scales. Gender seems to be significantly correlated with average contribution with a p-value of 0,0185 and a positive correlation coefficient: this means that a female student (gender = 1) would on average contribute more to the public good in the experiment than a male student (gender = 0). Age and income are not significantly correlated to average contribution. Cultural individualism however is negatively correlated to the contribution level with a p-value of almost 5%, meaning that on average, a higher individualism score is associated with lower contributions to the public good. The personal scales that measure individualism-collectivism as well as horizontal-vertical attitudes towards society seem not to be correlated to the average contribution level.
In Table IV on the next page, the results of a
regression of the independent variables gender and cultural individualism on the dependent variable average
Table III: Correlation coefficients
Correlation coefficient Average contribution
Gender 0,3255** (0,0185) Age in years – 0,1269 (0,3699) Income in euro 0,1433 (0,3108) Cultural individualism – 0,2737** (0,0496) Personal scales Horizontal individualism – 0,0822 (0,5623) Vertical individualism 0,0069 (0,9612) Horizontal collectivism 0,1229 (0,3853) Vertical collectivism 0,1580 (0,2633) Individualism–collectivism – 0,1315 (0,3526) Horizontal–vertical attitude – 0,0774 (0,5854) Notes: P-values in parenthesis. An asterisk (*) means significance at 1%; a double asterisk (**) means significance at 5%; a triple asterisk (***) means significance at 10%.
contribution are shown, as well as a second regression including age and income, and a third and fourth with the personal scales grouped by either individualism-collectivism or horizontal-vertical attitude. The first regression shows that both gender and cultural individualism give significant coefficients at the 5% significance level. The results indicate that females contribute on average $4 more than males. Furthermore, the cultural individualism coefficient is negative and shows that on average, with each point increase of the individualism score, the average contribution decreases by almost $0,14.
When looking at the second, third and fourth regression, gender stays significant at the 5% level at $4, or 8% of the endowment. In the fourth regression it even increases to $5,10 (10% of the endowment) with 0,5% significance. Cultural individualism also stays significant and at a similar level, though significance decreases in the second regression. Age, income and the personal individualism-collectivism scores do not influence
contribution rates significantly. However, in the last regression it is shown that horizontal-vertical attitude negatively influences contribution rates at a significance level of 10%.
Finally, All regressions show a statistically significant F-statistic, and R-squared scores ranging from 18,3% to 23%.
Table IV: OLS regression results
Regression Variable 1 2 3 4 Gender 3,939** (1,547) 4,007** (1,551) 3,95** (1,608) 5,122* (1,666) Age in years – 1,032 (0,747) Income in euro 0,009 (0,008) Cultural individualism – 0,139** (0,065) – 0,124*** (0,065) – 0,139** (0,067) – 0,133** (0,063) Individualism–collectivism 0,002 (0,062) Horizontal–vertical attitude – 0,163*** (0,095) Probability > F 0,0071 0,0162 0,0204 0,0053 R-squared 0,1830 0,2238 0,1830 0,2304
Notes: Standard errors in parenthesis. An asterisk (*) means significance at 1%; a double asterisk (**) means significance at 5%; a triple asterisk (***) means significance at 10%.
4. Explaining behaviour of the Dutch high school students
When looking at the OLS regression results, it is clear that in this experiment, gender has an impact on contributions to the experimental public good in all regressions. More precisely, it turns out that on average, females tend to contribute about $4 to $5 more to the public good than males. The general opinion on the influence of gender on public good contributions is not yet resolved, as according to Croson and Gneezy (2009) some researchers conclude that men contribute more and others that females do, while some do not find any significant differences. Most importantly, Chermak and Krause (2002) conclude that ‘gender effects are sensitive to protocol and context’. The gender effect from this study is thus neither affirmative nor controversial.
Cultural individualism seems to have a significant effect on contributions. With each point that individualism increases, contributions decrease on average by $0,12 to $0,14. When looking at two countries like the Netherlands with an individualism score of 80 and Indonesia with an individualism score of 14, this translates into average contributions for the Netherlands being lower by about $8 to $9, or almost 20% of the initial endowment. As said before, this effect has not been researched before in such a setting, but the results from this study indicate that an effect of cultural individualism on contribution levels exists, and could be attributed to the culture in which young people are being raised in different countries. As children in countries like Indonesia, Suriname or Morocco are raised with the idea that loyalty and commitment to your group (family, extended relationships) is important and one should take care of others, this induces the instinct that taking care of other people is a moral obligation. In the Netherlands on the other hand, and countries similar in individualism like the US or the UK, individuals are supposed to take care of themselves and their immediate family only. Children are taught to think for themselves and make their own decisions about who and what they want to be later in life. This cultural trait may result in young people feeling less obligated to contribute to common goals as they feel that everyone should be able to cope on his own.
An interesting result from the OLS regression is the fact that horizontal-vertical attitude appears to have a negative effect on contribution level. In other words, as students put more emphasis on equality, they tend to contribute less to the public good. One reason for this phenomenon could be that, as these subjects value equality, they would like for everyone to contribute similar amounts to the public good. In most groups at least one or two people fairly soon contribute very small amounts to the public good, and by seeing the total
contributed amount decrease the people from who equality is important might respond by also decreasing their contributions more than people for whom inequality is less of a problem. This is however just a suggestion which cannot be scientifically proven using the data from this study. While it could also be the case that this results comes from a correlation between cultural individualism and power distance as the Dutch are both individualistic and find equality important, the data shows no significant correlation between the two.
5. Discussion of differences and similarities between and across classes
There are a few differences between the classes from which subjects were recruited that ought to be discussed. First of all, because the oldest class was of a higher educational level than the other two, and the ones on a somewhat lower level were also younger, this might affect results in the way that age effects might also be attributable to educational level differences. However, age did not have a significant effect on contribution level. Educational level of individuals might also be playing a role: the smartest and oldest class contains a bigger part of Dutch students, while the youngest and less educated class contains a more sizeable part of non-Dutch students. If for instance, less educated students tend to contribute more to a public good than smarter students, the coefficient of cultural individualism could be smaller or less significant than it is estimated to be.
An interesting difference is that some people continued to contribute the same part of their endowment throughout the entire game, even though their co-players decreases their contributions over time. This happened more often in the younger class than in the older one, and might be attributed to the setup of the game, which could be too difficult for some participants to fully understand. While it wasn’t formally tested, during the experiments it became clear that for a few students it was difficult to grasp the mechanism behind the game and how it was possible to make money with it. However, most subjects showed they understood the game and after the experiment a few even indicated they had come up with the social and individual welfare-maximizing strategies, both in the older and the younger classes.
Another important dissimilarity is the division of non-Dutch students across gender: while almost 60% (15 out of 26) of the male participants were of non-Dutch origin, only 25% (7 out of 26) of female students had immigrant roots. As males contribute on average less to a public good in an experimental settings, this could have decreased the magnitude of the estimated coefficient of cultural individualism, and the real impact might be larger. On the other hand, the gender coefficient might take care of this cultural inequality across genders. Also, when looking at students who were culturally more distant from the Dutch students, the division turned out to be equal.
A notable and also surprising result that was the same in all three classes is the positive average
horizontal-vertical attitude, meaning all classes had on average a more favourable attitude towards equality. This can actually be explained using another one of Hofstede’s dimensions, namely power distance. The Netherlands have a score of 38 on this dimension, because the Dutch value independence and equal rights and find it
important that hierarchy is for convenience only and superiors should be accessible (Hofstede, 2010). When looking at the few students with roots in Suriname or Indonesia (who have power distance scores of 85 and 78), they did not score much lower on horizontal-vertical attitude, what would be expected as those nations value hierarchy and distance between employee and superior. A public goods provision study done by Habyarimana et
al. (2007) in the United States exhibits a similar general inequality aversion among its test subjects, which is in line with the results from this study as the US also have a low score (40) on the power distance dimension.
6. Conclusion
This study set out to investigate whether individualism as a cultural and personal trait as well as gender, age and welfare would have an effect on average contributions to a public good in an experimental setting. While personal individualism, age and welfare have not been found to have a significant effect, cultural individualism and gender seem to affect contributions levels in a meaningful way. Of the students aged 14-18 taken from a Dutch high school, females tended to contribute on average $4 more to the public good than males. Furthermore, each point increase in cultural individualism is associated with a $0,14 decrease of average contributions, translating to an estimated $9, or 20% of the endowment difference in average contributions between a typical Dutch and Indonesian students, where the latter would be contributing more due to his low individualism score. Additional results show, interestingly, that power distance measured as horizontal-vertical attitude (the
importance of equality) in this study appears to negatively influence contributions levels, in such a way that as equality gets more important subjects tend to contribute less to the public good.
A weakness of this research is the small sample of students: 52 subjects participated in the experiment, of which only 22 were of partly non-Dutch origin and only 10 varied significantly in their cultural individualism score. A recommendation for research meant to enrich knowledge on this subject should therefore focus on collecting a larger sample of culturally diverse students. Furthermore, future research carried out in multiple countries with various levels of cultural individualism should shed more light on the effects of culture as a national trait on contributions to public goods in an experimental setting, as in this study only students living in the Netherlands were taking part. This could mean that even though students had foreign roots, they could have been influenced in a large part by Dutch culture. On the other hand, as results from this study already suggest that the intuition of individualism influencing the average contribution levels to a public good is correct, this gives hope for replicating the results with data from a larger sample from multiple countries.
Appendix
Appendix I: Instructions of the experiment
Background
Your class is collecting money to clean the pond in the school’s yard. More money collected means a
cleaner pond. Everyone benefits from a clean pond.
Your payoff
Your payoff is calculated by taking your Cash, adding that to all Contributions in the group of Citizens
and multiplied by the Rate of Return, minus your own Contribution.
Example:
Your Cash
+
Rate of
Return
x
Sum of
contributions
–
Your
Contribution
=
Your Payoff
$50
+
40%
x
$100
–
$25
=
$65
Explanation
Everyone receives to begin with a sum of $50 (for cleaning the pond an American company is hired
that wants to be paid in dollars). You decide what part of this money you want to contribute to
cleaning the pond.
We first play a trial round to see if everyone understands the game.
After this 20 rounds of the real game are played. You play every round with the same people, but you
do not know whom these people are.
Talking with your classmates is not allowed.
At the end of the game, when everyone has played, at random five people will be selected. They will
get paid out according to the exchange $100 = €1 (the dollar is very weak on the currency exchange).
If after 20 rounds your total payoff is for instance $1325, and you are randomly selected, you will get
€13,25.
Everyone has a chance at a reward between €4 and €22, conditional on his or her choices and the
lottery.
Instructions
1. Go to game.moblab.com.
2. Select ‘Register for a Student Account’.
3. Fill in your name and email and a password, check ‘I agree to the Terms and Conditions’ and
select ‘Let’s go’. You will receive no spam from Moblab, your email will only be used as a user
name.
4. Select ‘Take me to the Student Console’. Check your email to see whether you signed up
correctly.
5. Select ‘Add Class’. Fill in the code you have received on a separate piece of paper. Select ‘OK’.
6. You are now in the ‘Moblab Classroom Console’. Here you see a list of Games. Make sure you
have read the background on the reverse of this page, and ask any questions you have. The
games and surveys can be in a weird order, therefore please complete them in this order:
I.
Trial round
II.
Rounds 1 t/m 20
III.
Survey 1
IV.
Survey 2
7. When everybody is finished we begin the trial round. Do not start until you get the signal to do
so. Keep in mind: surveys 1 and 2, which are also in the list between the rounds, must be
filled out after the experiment is over.
8. After the trial round we play the 20 rounds of the game. Make sure you select the rounds in
the right order! Only confirm your contribution when you are sure you’re in the correct round:
you will not get the result after everyone of your group contributes, and you cannot change
your choices after contributing. You can see results from previous rounds. To do this just select
the round you wish to inspect.
9. After the 20 rounds have been played you can fill out surveys 1 and 2. The selected winners
will be announced after everyone has had his/her turn.
Appendix II: Questionnaires of the experiment
Questionnaire 1
1. You are:
☐
Male
☐
Female
2. Your age is:
3. You were born in:
4. Your nationality is:
5. Your mother was born in which country:
6. Your mother’s nationality is:
7. Your father was born in which country:
8. Your father’s nationality is:
9. In the culture of which country were you mainly raised:
10. Your monthly income, pocket money and work earnings combined, is:
Questionnaire 2
Horizontal individualism items:
1. I'd rather depend on myself than others.
2. I rely on myself most of the time; I rarely rely on others.
3. I often do "my own thing."
4. My personal identity, independent of others, is very important to me.
Vertical individualism items:
1. It is important that I do my job better than others.
2. Winning is everything.
3. Competition is the law of nature.
4. When another person does better than I do, I get tense and aroused.
Horizontal collectivism items:
1. If a classmate gets a prize, I would feel proud.
2. The well being of my classmates is important to me.
3. To me, pleasure is spending time with others.
4. I feel good when I cooperate with others.
Vertical collectivism items:
1. Parents and children must stay together as much as possible.
2. It is my duty to take care of my family, even when I have to sacrifice what I want.
3. Family members should stick together, no matter what sacrifices are required.
4. It is important to me that I respect the decisions made by my groups.
Prior to administering the questionnaire, the order was randomized. All questions were answered on a
9-‐point scale ranging from 1 = never to 9 = always.
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