It is sometimes said that money speaks louder than words, and in a world where financial decisions are a major driving force, it is interesting to explore how monetary incentives influence our decision making. Some argue that intrinsic motivation is sufficient to be able to measure prosocial decision-making, but what happens when we add monetary incentives to experiments that might otherwise be conducted with hypothetical scenarios? In this study, we conduct an online experiment with 1002 participants to explore if decision making changes when monetary incentives are introduced. The experiment includes five different social dilemmas involving distributions of money between participants. There are two conditions where one group makes hypothetical decisions and the other group receives money based on their decisions (i.e., is incentivized). Furthermore, we investigate if income, age and gender affect prosocial behavior. Our results suggest that both conditions show similar effects on prosocial behavior which implies that usage of either one of the two conditions will generate an equivalent outcome. The effects from household income, age and gender were significant in some social dilemmas, but the effect was not practically relevant for this study. We believe our results may be useful to include in the discussion of whether or not monetary incentives and hypothetical decisions generate similar results when studying prosocial behavior in decision making in experiments.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-194383 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Stark, Frida, Medenica, Sandra |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Nationalekonomi, Linköpings universitet, Filosofiska fakulteten |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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