Eliciting Responsibility for Negative Externalities: Theory and Experiment

Last registered on August 04, 2026
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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Eliciting Responsibility for Negative Externalities: Theory and Experiment
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0019297
Initial registration date
August 03, 2026

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
August 04, 2026, 10:14 AM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

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Primary Investigator

Name
Horia Guias
Affiliation
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

Additional Trial Information

Status
In development
Start date
2026-08-04
End date
2026-10-14
Keywords
Behavior, Lab
Additional Keywords
responsibility, morality, negative externalities, restoration, revealed preferences, structural estimation
JEL code(s)
C91, D62, D64, D91
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
Do individuals remediate negative externalities out of forward-looking concern for outcomes or backward-looking feelings of personal responsibility? I design a lab experiment that disentangles these mechanisms by holding present restoration consequences constant while exogenously varying the extent to which past harm was self-caused or externally generated. By systematically varying the unit price of restoration, I identify individual willingness to pay to restore self-caused versus other-caused harm. Finally, I estimate a structural random utility model via Maximum Likelihood to characterize preference heterogeneity across selfish, purely altruistic, purely clean-slate, and altruistic types who exhibit a responsibility premium for self-caused harm.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Guias, Horia. 2026. "Eliciting Responsibility for Negative Externalities: Theory and Experiment." AEA RCT Registry. August 04. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.19297-1.0
Sponsors & Partners
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
A participant selects a charity at the beginning of the experiment from a given list and receives instructions for the decisions she will make in this experiment. Then he faces a sequence of decision situations with varying final consequences: 7 decision situations in the first stage and 58 decision situations in the second stage (random order). The first stage serves to generate the negative externality which can then be restored in the second stage. In addition, the participant observes existing harm whose origin she does not know ex-ante.
Intervention Start Date
2026-08-04
Intervention End Date
2026-10-14

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Amount of harm (value of cancelled donation in €) caused by participant in first stage, amount of harm (value of cancelled donation in €) of given origin (self-caused or external) restored in the second stage.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
elicited personal norm about propriety to restore harm of varying origin, beliefs about origin of external harm, preference intensity for selected charity
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
Participants make incentivized choices affecting their monetary earnings and a real-world charity selected at the beginning of the experiment. Negative externalities are operationalized as the cancellation of charitable donations.

The experiment proceeds in three main parts:

Stage 1 (Harm Generation): Participants complete a series of choices between increasing personal monetary earnings and preventing negative externalities (cancelled charitable donations).

Stage 2 (Harm Restoration): Participants face choices where they can pay to remediate cancelled donations. The origin of the harm (self-caused in Stage 1 versus externally generated pre-existing harm) and the unit price of restoration are systematically varied to identify willingness to pay across harm types.

Post-Experiment Survey: Participants complete a survey eliciting personal moral norms regarding harm restoration, self-reported decision reasoning, and baseline attitudes toward the selected charity.
Experimental Design Details
Not available
Randomization Method
Randomization of sequence of decision situations
Randomization Unit
Individual participant
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
Sessions with 30-50 participants are run on Prolific until 150 participants are obtained whose behaviour can be analysed in the second stage of the experiment.
Sample size: planned number of observations
Sessions with 30-50 participants are run on Prolific until 150 participants are obtained whose behaviour can be analysed in the second stage of the experiment.
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
Within-subject design: 150 individual participants (1 arm). All participants experience all treatment conditions and price variations across the sequence of decision situations.
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Supporting Documents and Materials
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Institutional Committee for Ethical Review of Projects (CIREP)
IRB Approval Date
2026-04-27
IRB Approval Number
475
Analysis Plan

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