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Selective Exposure Reduces Voluntary Contributions: Experimental Evidence from the German Internet Panel
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The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has a massive impact on society. To curb the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, unprecedented containment measures are being taken by governments around the world. These measures and the fear of the disease itself are likely affecting the economy, social inequality, mental and physical health, and even people's perception of good democratic governance. Equally unprecedented is the speed at which these massive changes take place and the lack of statistical evidence that accompanies them. Within days of the first containment measures in Germany, the German Internet Panel (GIP) launched the Mannheim Corona Study (MCS), a daily rotating panel study of the general adult population of approximately 3,600 respondents. Its data and reports now inform the crisis cabinet of the German government and are the basis for groundbreaking social and economic research. This paper gives insights into the MCS methodology and data quality.
We address the diffusion of information about the COVID-19 with a massive data analysis on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and Gab. We analyze engagement and interest in the COVID-19 topic and provide a differential assessment on the evolution of the discourse on a global scale for each platform and their users. We fit information spreading with epidemic models characterizing the basic reproduction number R 0 for each social media platform. Moreover, we identify information spreading from questionable sources, finding different volumes of misinformation in each platform. However, information from both reliable and questionable sources do not present different spreading patterns. Finally, we provide platform-dependent numerical estimates of rumors’ amplification.
There is an ongoing debate in the survey research literature about whether and when probability and nonprobability sample surveys produce accurate estimates of a larger population. Statistical theory provides a justification for confidence in probability sampling as a function of the survey design, whereas inferences based on nonprobability sampling are entirely dependent on models for validity. This article reviews the current debate about probability and nonprobability sample surveys. We describe the conditions under which nonprobability sample surveys may provide accurate results in theory and discuss empirical evidence on which types of samples produce the highest accuracy in practice. From these theoretical and empirical considerations, we derive best-practice recommendations and outline paths for future research.
This paper investigates in a large and heterogeneous sample the relationship between social preferences and political attitudes. Social preferences relate to political attitudes in a particular way: Selfish subjects are the extremists on the one side of the political spectrum – they are more likely to vote for a right-wing party, less inclined to favor redistribution, less likely to hold favorable views towards immigration and more likely to consider themselves right-wing than all other types. Inequality-averse, altruistic and maximin subjects, all characterized by benevolence in the domain of advantageous inequality, sit at the opposite end of the spectrum. Overall, our evidence indicates that political outcomes in various domains such as taxation, social security, the pension system or immigration cannot be fully understood without taking distributional preferences into account.
In this paper we assess public attitudes on climate change in Europe over the last decade. Using aggregate figures from the Special Eurobarometer surveys on Climate Change, we find that climate change attitudes have evolved according to the "S-shaped" information dissemination model, conditional to various socioeconomic and climatological factors. In particular, we find that environmental awareness is directly related to per capita income, social trust, secondary education, the physical distress associated with hot weather and loss caused by extreme weather episodes. It is also inversely related to greenhouse gas emissions and tertiary education. Moreover, consistent with our epidemics-like narrative, we find a negative impact for Donald Trump's denial campaigns and a larger positive effect for Greta Thunberg's environmental activism. In terms of policy implications, this paper calls on the EU to take up leadership in the fight against climate change and declare a climate emergency. It also calls on teachers to introduce their students to climate change, science journals to allow wide access to any climate change article they publish and public institutions to protect climate change evidence from politicization. This paper finally calls for the close coordination of monetary and fiscal policies, to allow the green bonds market to reach rapidly the size required for the implementation of effective climate change mitigation policies.
This paper investigates systemic risk that emerges from the interplay between uncertain returns to individual actions, uncertainty on others’ behavior and all this filtered through individual attitudes toward risk. We design a finitely repeated linear public good experiment based on a voluntary contribution mechanism and analyze the effect of risky and uncertain returns on subjects’ contributions. Results from a baseline treatment without uncertainty are compared with two risky treatments characterized by different values for the marginal per capita return. In the treatments with risk, subjects are randomly assigned to one out of three feasible marginal per capita returns, independently of what their individual contribution was. Results show that a sufficient level of uncertainty leads to significantly lower individual contributions. Furthermore, in a system with lower contributions due to uncertainty, subjects’ risk aversion enhances the systemic risk, leading the system to collapse.
Research has shown that the non-Internet population is hesitant to respond to online survey requests. However, also subgroups in the Internet population with low digital affinity may hesitate to respond to online surveys. This latter issue has not yet received much attention by scholars despite its potentially detrimental effects on the external validity of online survey data. In this article, we explore the extent to which a person’s digital affinity contributes to nonresponse bias in the German Internet Panel, a probability-based online panel of the general population. With a multidimensional classification of digital affinity, we predict response to the first online panel wave and participation across panel waves. We find that persons who belong to different classes of digital affinity have systematically different sociodemographic characteristics and show different voting behavior. In addition, we find that initial response propensities vary by classes of digital affinity, as do attrition patterns over time. Our results demonstrate the importance of digital affinity for the reduction in nonresponse bias during fieldwork and for postsurvey adjustments.
Addressing fake news requires a multidisciplinary effort
Avoiding information about adverse welfare consequences of self-interested decisions, or willful ignorance, is an important source of socially harmful behavior. To understand this issue, we analyze a Bayesian signaling model of an agent who cares about self-image and has the opportunity to learn the social benefits of a personally costly action. We show that willful ignorance can serve as an excuse for selfish behavior by obfuscating the signal about the decision-maker’s preferences, and help maintain the idea that the agent would have acted virtuously under full information. We derive several behavioral predictions that are inconsistent with either outcome-based preferences or social-image concern and conduct experiments to test them. Our findings, as well as a number of previous experimental results, offer support for these predictions and thus, the broader theory of self-signaling.
Denial of scientific findings is neither a new nor an unexplored phenomenon. In the area of environmental science and policy though, the research on denial has not been systematically summarized and analyzed. This article reviews 161 scientific articles on environmental and climate science denial published in peer reviewed international journals in the last 25 years and aims to both identify research gaps and enable learning on the phenomenon. Such knowledge is needed for the increasingly important task to provide effective response to science denial, in order to put an end to its influence on environmental policy making. The review, which is based on articles found in the databases Web of Science, Scopus and Philosopher's Index, shows that denial by far is most studied in relation to climate change, with a focus on Anglo-American countries, where this form of denial is most common. Other environmental issues and other geographical areas have received much less scientific attention. While the actors behind climate science denial, their various motives and the characteristics of their operations have been thoroughly described, more comparative research between issues and countries is needed in order to draw reliable conclusions about the factors explaining the peculiarities of denial. This may in turn lay the ground for developing and actually testing the effectiveness and efficiency of strategies to counter environmental science denial. Irrespective of the ambitions of environmental goals, science-based policies are always preferable. The scientific community therefore needs to increase its efforts to dismantle false claims and to disclose the schemes of denialists.
Previous research indicates that risky and uncertain marginal returns from the public good significantly lower contributions. This paper presents experimental results illustrating that the effects of risk and uncertainty depend on the employed parameterization. Speci?cally, if the value of the marginal per capita return under the worst state of nature allows for some efficiency gains, the presence of risk and uncertainty about the public good's value is not detrimental to cooperation. This ?nding casts doubt on the hypothesis that risk and uncertainty, per se, weaken people's willingness to contribute.
The past decade has seen a rise in the use of online panels for conducting survey research. However, the popularity of online panels, largely driven by relatively low implementation costs and high rates of Internet penetration, has been met with criticisms regarding their ability to accurately represent their intended target populations. This criticism largely stems from the fact that (1) non-Internet (or offline) households, despite their relatively small size, constitute a highly selective group unaccounted for in Internet panels, and (2) the preeminent use of nonprobability-based recruitment methods likely contributes a self-selection bias that further compromises the representativeness of online panels. In response to these criticisms, some online panel studies have taken steps to recruit probability-based samples of individuals and providing them with the means to participate online. Using data from one such study, the German Internet Panel, this article investigates the impact of including offline households in the sample on the representativeness of the panel. Consistent with studies in other countries, we find that the exclusion of offline households produces significant coverage biases in online panel surveys, and the inclusion of these households in the sample improves the representativeness of the survey despite their lower propensity to respond.
Inferential statistics teach us that we need a random probability sample to infer from a sample to the general population. In online survey research, however, volunteer access panels, in which respondents self-select themselves into the sample, dominate the landscape. Such panels are attractive due to their low costs. Nevertheless, recent years have seen increasing numbers of debates about the quality, in particular about errors in the representativeness and measurement, of such panels. In this article, we describe four probability-based online and mixed-mode panels for the general population, namely, the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences (LISS) Panel in the Netherlands, the German Internet Panel (GIP) and the GESIS Panel in Germany, and the Longitudinal Study by Internet for the Social Sciences (ELIPSS) Panel in France. We compare them in terms of sampling strategies, offline recruitment procedures, and panel characteristics. Our aim is to provide an overview to the scientific community of the availability of such data sources to demonstrate the potential strategies for recruiting and maintaining probability-based online panels to practitioners and to direct analysts of the comparative data collected across these panels to methodological differences that may affect comparative estimates.
The paper looks into the processes and outcomes of setting-up and maintaining a probability-based longitudinal online survey, which is recruited face-to-face and representative of both the online and offline population aged 16 to 75 in Germany. This German Internet Panel (GIP) studies political and economic attitudes and reform preferences through bi-monthly longitudinal online interviews of individuals. The results presented demonstrate that a carefully designed and implemented online panel can produce high-quality data at lower marginal costs than existing panels that operate solely in face-to-face mode. Analyses into the representativeness of the online sample showed no major coverage or nonresponse biases. Finally, including offline households in the panel is important as it improves the representation of the older and female segments of the population.
In many cases individuals benefit differently from the provision of a public good. We study in a laboratory experiment how heterogeneity in returns and uncertainty affects unconditional and conditional contribution behavior in a linear public goods game. The elicitation of conditional contributions in combination with a within subject design allows us to investigate belief-independent and type-specific reactions to heterogeneity. We find that, on average, heterogeneity in returns decreases unconditional contributions but does not affects conditional contributions only weakly. Uncertainty in addition to heterogeneity reduces conditional contributions slightly. Individual reactions to heterogeneity differ systematically. Selfish subjects and one third of conditional cooperators do not react to heterogeneity whereas the reactions of the remaining conditional cooperators vary. A substantial part of heterogeneity in reactions can be explained by inequity aversion which accounts for different reference groups subjects compare to.
We investigate to what extent contribution decisions to a public good depend on the contributions of others. We employ a novel experimental technique that allows us to elicit people's willingness to be conditionally cooperative, i.e., to contribute more to the public good the more the other beneficiaries contribute. We find that about a third of subjects' contribution schedules is characterized by complete free-riding. However, a majority of 50 percent of the subjects displays conditional cooperation. Our results can explain why in most repeated public goods experiments subjects initially cooperate while towards the final periods cooperation declines to very low levels
This paper explores whether generosity in experiments is truly evidence of concern for desirable social outcomes. We conduct
an experiment using a binary version of the dictator game. We introduce several treatments in which subjects are able to leave
the relationship between their actions and resulting outcomes uncertain, either to themselves or to another subject influenced
by those actions, thus giving subjects the moral “wiggle room” to behave self-interestedly. We find significantly less generous
behavior in these manipulations, relative to a baseline in which the relationship between actions and outcomes is transparent.
We conclude that many subjects behave fairly in the baseline case mainly because they intrinsically dislike appearing unfair,
either to themselves or others.
Corruption in the public sector erodes tax compliance and leads to higher tax evasion. Moreover, corrupt public officials abuse their public power to extort bribes from the private agents. In both types of interaction with the public sector, the private agents are bound to face uncertainty with respect to their disposable incomes. To analyse effects of this uncertainty, a stochastic dynamic growth model with the public sector is examined. It is shown that deterministic excessive red tape and corruption deteriorate the growth potential through income redistribution and public sector inefficiencies. Most importantly, it is demonstrated that the increase in corruption via higher uncertainty exerts adverse effects on capital accumulation, thus leading to lower growth rates.
In this paper, we assess public attitudes on climate change in Europe over the last decade. Using aggregate fig.s from the Special Eurobarometer surveys on Climate Change, we find that environmental concern is directly related to per capita income, social trust, secondary education, the physical distress associated with hot weather, media coverage, the share of young people in the total population, and monetary losses caused by extreme weather episodes. It is also inversely related to greenhouse gas emissions, relative power position of right-wing parties in government and tertiary education. Moreover, we find a significant, opposite impact for two dummies for years 2017 and 2019, which we respectively associate with the effects of Donald Trump’s denial campaigns and the U.S. Paris Agreement withdrawal announcement, and Greta Thunberg’s environmental activism.
This paper theoretically and experimentally investigates the impact of information provision on voluntary contributions to a linear public good with an uncertain marginal per-capita return (MPCR). Uninformed donors make contribution decisions based only on the expected MPCR (i.e. the prior distribution), while informed donors observe the realized MPCR before contributing. The theoretical analysis predicts that the impact of information on average contributions crucially depends on the generosity level of the population, modeled as a stochastic change in the pro-social preferences. In particular, a less generous population increases contributions substantially in response to good news of higher than expected MPCR and reduces contributions relatively little in response to bad news of lower than expected MPCR. The opposite is true for a more generous population. Thus, the theory predicts that information provision increases (reduces) average contributions when the population is less (more) generous. This prediction finds strong support in a two-stage lab experiment. The first stage measures subjects’ generosity in the public good game using an online experiment. The resulting measure is used to create more and less generous groups in the public good lab experiment, which varies the information provided to these groups in the lab. The findings are in line with the theoretical predictions, suggesting that targeted information provision to less generous groups may be more beneficial for public good contributions than uniform information provision.
We investigate if decision makers avoid information to exploit moral wiggle room in green market settings. We
therefore implement a laboratory experiment in which subjects purchase products associated with externalities.
In six between-subjects treatments, we alter the availability of information on the externalities, the price of
revealing information as well as the nature of the externality, which could either affect another subject or change
the amount spent by the experimenters on carbon offsets. We find that subjects do not strategically avoid information
when revealing information is costless. When a very small cost of revealing information is introduced,
their behavior depends on the relation between prices and externalities. In situations in which it is relatively
cheap to have a large impact on the recipient's payoff, subjects avoid information in order to choose selfishly. For
other parameterizations, subjects behave either honestly egoistically or altruistically.
We consider a decision maker (DM) who, before taking an action, seeks information by allocating her limited attention dynamically over different news sources that are biased toward alternative actions. Endogenous choice of information generates rich dynamics: the chosen news source either reinforces or weakens the prior, shaping subsequent attention choices, belief updating, and the final action. The DM adopts a learning strategy biased toward the current belief when the belief is extreme and against that belief when it is moderate. Applied to consumption of news media, observed behavior exhibits an “ echo-chamber” effect for partisan voters and a novel “ anti-echo-chamber” effect for moderates. (JEL D72, D83, D91, L82)
We propose a cognitive-dissonance model of norm compliance to identify conditions for selfishly biased information acquisition. The model distinguishes between: (i) objective norm compliers, for whom the right action is a function of
the state of the world; (ii) subjective norm compliers, for whom it is a function of their belief. The former seek as much information as possible; the latter acquire only information that lowers, in expected terms, normative demands. The source of 'moral wiggle room' is not belief manipulation, but the coarseness of normative prescriptions under conditions of uncertainty. In a novel experimental
setup, we find evidence for such strategic information uptake. Our results suggest that attempts to change behavior by subjecting individuals to norms can lead to biased information acquisition instead of compliance.
Individuals with a preference for keeping moral obligations may dislike learning that voluntary contributions are socially valuable: such information can trigger unpleasant feelings of cognitive dissonance. I show that if the initial belief about the social value of contributions is too low to merit a moral responsibility to contribute, duty-oriented consumers are willing to pay to avoid information. Information campaigns can make such consumers contribute by providing them with unwanted information.
One lingering puzzle is why voluntary contributions to public goods decline over time in experimental and real-world settings. We show that the decline of cooperation is driven by individual preferences for imperfect conditional cooperation. Many people's desire to contribute less than others, rather than changing beliefs of what others will contribute over time or people's heterogeneity in preferences makes voluntary cooperation fragile. Universal free riding thus eventually emerges, despite the fact that most people are not selfish. (D12, D 83, H41, Z13)
"This paper uses laboratory evidence from public goods games to examine how in payoff-equivalent situations, decision makers contribute toward private or public goods when they are exposed to different kinds of risks and uncertainties in the provision of these goods. We find that location matters with subjects moving away from the environmental uncertainty in favor of strategic uncertainty when that uncertainty is located on the private good. When the uncertainty relates to the public good, subjects face both kinds of uncertainties on the same good, leading to a significant drop in contributions. An opportunity to reduce uncertainty increases cooperation. "("JEL "C90, D81, H41) Copyright (c) 2008 Western Economic Association International.
This paper reports the results of an experimental study which introduces an endogenous probability of public good provision into the voluntary contributions mechanism. Specifically, the two treatments allow for nonprovision even with positive contributions. In one treatment, the provision probability rises with increased contributions (while preserving the dominant strategy equilibrium of zero contributions). The results show that uncertainty per se lowers individual but not group contributions, lagged marginal incentives significantly predict contributions, and individuals significantly react to own-deviations from average group contributions. This has implications for work teams or professional sports teams who see increased probability of group rewards given higher effort levels.
and SFB 884 Political Economy of Reforms
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884 Political Economy of Reforms
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