Erik Wengström

Professor, Studierektor forskarutbildning, Nationalekonomiska institutionen

Cooperation, framing, and political attitudes

Författare

Toke R. Fosgaard
Lars G. Hansen
Erik Wengström

Summary, in English

This paper shows that political attitudes are linked to cooperative behavior in an incentivized experiment with a large sample randomly drawn from the Danish population. However, this relationship depends on the way the experiment is framed. In the standard game in which subjects give to a public good, contributions are not linked to political attitudes. In an economically equivalent version, in which subjects take from a public good, left-wingers cooperate significantly more than subjects to the right of the political spectrum. This difference is to some extent caused by differences in beliefs and cooperation preferences but a substantial part is left unexplained, indicating that left wingers find cooperating under this institution more attractive than right wingers do.

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