History Dependence And The Formation Of Social Preferences

Download or read book History Dependence and the Formation of Social Preferences written by David J. Cooper and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We study the minimal contributing set (MCS) game, a three-person sequential step-level public goods game. The behavior of critical third players changes with experience in this game even though they face no strategic or payoff uncertainty. We explore why these changes occur by manipulating subjects' experience in the first half of the experiment. The treatments give subjects very different initial experiences, but all treatments move subjects' choices toward experienced subjects' play in the control sessions. Long-run play is indistinguishable across treatments. Our results are more consistent with the discovered preferences-hypothesis (Plott 1996) than either the constructed preference- or reference point-hypotheses.