Experimental Design
We conduct an online survey experiment with 1200 respondents/observations in Germany. The experiment examines whether spillover effects in risk perception depend on the type of the assessed risk. To this end, three treatments are developed which provide information either for (i) a societal event/risk, (ii) a personal event/risk and (iii) a neutral event/information (see the interventions above). In all three treatments, subjects are asked to state their subjective worries in the same set of domains (e.g., crime, economic situation, climate). These worries are measured before and after the information provision which allows to use differences for each subject, thereby eliminating individual fixed effects. The two budget allocation tasks measure the policy priorities concerning public spending for each experimental subject. In the first task, the budget is fixed and subjects can distribute 100 points (100 percent) to three policy areas (economy, health, security). In the second task, the budget is not fixed such that subjects can choose whether the budget for spending should be reduced / stay the same / expanded, and at the same time subjects distribute this budget to three policy areas. This part of the experiment allows to test the link between the type of risk / event and preferences for public spending. Finally, the remaining part of the survey contains standard tasks to elicit risk aversion, ambiguity aversion and questions for measuring personality and various attitudes. We hypothesize that there is considerable heterogeneity on the subject-level concerning the degree of spillover to other risk domains, and we will investigate whether this heterogeneity can be linked to personality.
The sample will be representative concerning age and gender (using quotas) for the German population, and randomization occurs at the subject/individual-level.