title: Cooperation in Public Good Games. Calculated or Confused?
creator: Goeschl, Timo
creator: Lohse, Johannes
subject: ddc-330
subject: 330 Economics
description: Recent experiments suggest that contribution decisions in a public goods game (PGG) are more likely to be cooperative if based on intuition rather than reflection. This paper (i) reinvestigates the behavioral impact of so-called cognitive style in the PGG; and (ii) connects it with an earlier literature on the role of cognitive failure (confusion). This is motivated by the possibility that the method of time pressure, commonly used to identify cognitive style, invites confusion as a confounding factor. Two channels for such confounds are identified and experimentally tested: A heterogeneous treatment effect of time pressure depending on subject's confusion status and a direct impact of time pressure on subjects' likelihood of being confused. Our reinvestigation on the behavioral impact of time pressure confirms that cognitive style matters, but that deliberation rather than intuition drives  cooperation. The confounding effect of confusion is not found to be direct, but to operate through a heterogeneous treatment effect. Time pressure selectively reduces average  contributions among those subjects whose contributions can confidently be interpreted as cooperative rather than confused.
date: 2016-11
type: Working paper
type: info:eu-repo/semantics/workingPaper
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserverhttps://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/22247/1/goeschl_lohse_2016_dp626.pdf
identifier: DOI:10.11588/heidok.00022247
identifier: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-222473
identifier:   Goeschl, Timo ; Lohse, Johannes  (2016) Cooperation in Public Good Games. Calculated or Confused?  [Working paper]     
relation: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/22247/
rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/help/license_urhg.html
language: eng