Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/98456 
Year of Publication: 
2014
Series/Report no.: 
Jena Economic Research Papers No. 2014-010
Publisher: 
Friedrich Schiller University Jena and Max Planck Institute of Economics, Jena
Abstract: 
We use information on students´ past participation in economic experiments, as stored in our database, to analyze whether behavior in public goods games is affected by experience (i.e., previous participation in social dilemma-type experiments) and history (i.e., participation in experiments of a different class than the social dilemma). We have three main results. First, at the aggregate level, the amount subjects contribute and expect others to contribute decrease with experience. Second, a mixture model reveals that the proportion of unconditional cooperators decreases with experience, while that of selfish individuals increases. Finally, history also influences behavior, although to a lesser extent than experience. Our findings have important methodological implications for researchers, who are urged to control for subjects´ experience and history in their experiments if they want to improve the external validity and replicability of their results.
Subjects: 
experience
history
mixture models
public goods experiments
social preferences
JEL: 
C35
C51
C72
H41
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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