Rule Following and Cooperation

2022-07-26

2022-07-27

The number of tokens placed in the blue bucket are the primary outcome variable. They indicate the extent of rule following and cooperation, respectively.

Empirical expectations, that is, participants guesses of (1) the number of tokens other participants placed in the blue bucket and (2) the number of other participants who placed all of their tokens into the blue bucket.

We expect empirical expectations to be correlated with actual own decisions.

This experiment focuses on the relationship between rule-following and cooperative behaviour in social dilemmas, by adapting the “bucket task” by Kimbrough and Vostroknutov (2018). Across five experimental treatments participants are asked to allocate five tokens between a blue and a yellow bucket. In all experimental treatments the primary outcome of interest is the number of tokens placed in the blue bucket, which represents the rate of rule-following and cooperation, respectively. We will also elicit empirical expectations measured as the expected allocation of tokens to the blue bucket by other participants.

The five experimental treatments are:

1. Baseline Public Goods Game (PGG) – No Rule;
2. Baseline Rule Following Task (RFT) – No Public Good;
3. PGG with a Rule;
4. PGG with a Social Rule (“helps other group members”);
5. RFT and PGG No Rule (order of tasks randomised).

T1 to T4 are between-subjects, and T5 is within-subjects. All treatments are followed by a questionnaire asking about gender, age, and political ideology and the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick, 2005).

We will collect 104 participants in each of the 5 treatments, that is, a total of 520 participants. The experiment will be run on the platform Prolific using the software LIONESS Lab (Giamattei et al. 2020). It has received ethical approval from the Nottingham School of Economics Research Ethics committee.

Both the PGG and the RFT are one-shot games.

** Follow up Experiments of T5 (planned for December 2022) **

In the first wave of experiments with T1 to T5 (run on Prolific on 27 July 2022) we collected about 104 observations per treatment on average. In T5 which has two orders we only had 56 observations on average. Since there is evidence for order effects with the RFT we decided to replicate T5 with increased numbers of observations such that we have the same expected number of observations in all treatments regardless of order.

We will therefore rerun T5 (RFT and PGG No Rule) in both orders with an expected sample size of 110 each. This will give us increased power to detect any potential order effects, and also allow for proper comparison between behaviour in T5 with behaviour in Baseline PGG and Baseline RFT respectively. To be on the safe side the target sample size in both orders of T5 is 110. To allow for dropouts (estimated from wave 1 to be roughly 10%) and to facilitate the collection of equal numbers our target will be to recruit 250 participants (that is 125 per order in T5) which should accommodate for potential dropouts of about 15 per treatment enabling us to collect 110 complete observations in each order.

All procedural details described in the rest of this preregistration remain the same.

Not available

People will be randomly allocated into one of the five treatments by the LIONESS Lab software (https://lioness-lab.org/).

In the follow up experiments of T5 participants will be randomly allocated into one of the two orders by the LIONESS Lab software (https://lioness-lab.org/).

Individuals are randomly allocated to one of the 5 treatments. In T5 the order of tasks is randomized, and the task that is paid will be randomized as well.

Yes

In treatments 1 - 4 participants will take only one decision. In T5 participants take two decisions and we will therefore cluster at the individual level.

We will recruit 104 participants for each of the 5 treatments, that is, a total of 520 people. The previous sentence refers to the previous experiment run in July 2022. We now plan a follow up with an additional 250 participants, allowing for dropouts. See details above in the experimental design.

On average 104 participants per treatment were collected in July 2022.

In the follow up experiments of T5 we plan to recruit 125 participants with a target number per order of 110 after dropouts.