The Shadow of Consumption

• In Event: 087 - Section on Rationality and Society Paper Session. Sustainable Cooperation and Individual Interests in a Changing World

Abstract

While there have been many variations in the experimental investigation of the public good dilemma, nearly all have shared the assumption that public goods (e.g., clean air or national security) are passively/automatically consumed by actors in the real world. As a consequence, in the standard experimental design, the public good is automatically redistributed to all group members, regardless of whether (or how much) each contributed to its provision. Here, we suggest that the automatic distribution of benefits design, in which each group member passively receives his or her share of the public good, systematically under-represents many real world public goods which must be actively consumed in order to benefit (e.g., NPR, public parks, or open content). Our shadow of consumption hypothesis states that actors who anticipate the active consumption of a public good will contribute significantly more to its provision than those who anticipate automatic distribution or passive consumption, as is the case in the standard public goods design. The results of a new experiment fully support our hypothesis, suggesting that because it does not account for how anticipated use drives contribution, the standard public goods design might systematically overestimate the level of free-riding that occurs in the provision of many public goods. Another implication of the ‘shadow of consumption’ hypothesis is that, all other things equal, public goods that must be actively consumed will be provided at higher levels than those that are passively consumed.

Authors

• Michael Constantin Hahn, Stanford University

• Brent Simpson, University of South Carolina