In a survey experiment as well as a traditional laboratory experiment, we investigate whether the public support of CO2 taxation depends on the further use of the collected funds such investment into green technology or various redistribution schemes (e.g., 'Klimageld'). We also explore how the stated preferences depend on the political affiliations, environmental attitudes and social demographics (in particular, income).
The basic idea is to augment vote counting rules in the following manner: uncast votes are not ignored but rather, randomly allocated to the alternatives. This behavioral intervention has a number of benefits (not distortive under plurality voting, does not require private information to be revealed etc.) and affects rational utility maximizers as long as they are risk-averse but the main effect in curbing abstention is expected to come from leveraging various psychological phenomena (endowment effect, out-group hate etc.).
We aim to investigate the gravity of self-serving beliefs on the dictator side by manipulating the level of ambiguity they have as far as the responsibility of the recipient for their poor relative financial standing. For instance, (i) would the dictator want to resolve said ambiguity; (ii) does the presence of the choice itself affect the transfer amount?
We suspect that there is a peculiar self-serving nuance to violation of one’s freedom of choice as the number one argument against paternalism. In order to test this proposition, we design scenarios where a third party actually expands a preliminary choice set of the dictator by introducing either a pro-social or pro-self allocation option such that the resulting sets are identical. We expect the dictators to exhibit self-serving anti-paternalistic preferences in that they will punish the third party for increasing their opportunity to behave pro-socially and the other way round.
Various theories suggest that having to wait for other participants to answer control questions in a typical laboratory experiment can have detrimental effects on the observed prosocial behavior in the actual study. We test this proposition in the context of conditional cooperation in a public goods game.