Do Children Cooperate Conditionally? Adapting the Strategy Method for First-Graders

Florian Hett, Mario Mechtel, Henning Müller (), Felix Schmidt, Daniel Schunk and Valentin Wagner
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Henning Müller: NHH Bergen
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Henning Hermes

No 1803, Working Papers from Gutenberg School of Management and Economics, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

Abstract: We develop a public goods game (PGG) to measure cooperation and conditional cooperation in young children. Our design addresses several obstacles in adapting simultaneous and sequential PGGs to children who are not yet able to read or write, do not possess advanced abilities to calculate payo s, and only have a very limited attention span at their disposal. It features the combination of haptic online explanation, fully standardized audiovisual instructions, computerized choices based on touchscreens, and a suitable incentive scheme. Applying our experimental protocol to a sample of German first-graders, we find that already 6-year-olds cooperate conditionally and that the relative frequency of di erent cooperation types matches the findings for adult subjects. We also find that neither survey items from teachers nor from parents predict unconditional or conditional cooperation behavior; this underlines the value of incentivized experimental protocols for measuring cooperation in children.

Keywords: Conditional cooperation; strategy method; public goods game; revealed preferences; measurement; children; ingroup bias; group identity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C71 C91 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2018-01-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-gth
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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https://download.uni-mainz.de/RePEc/pdf/Discussion_Paper_1803.pdf First version, 2018 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Do children cooperate conditionally? Adapting the strategy method for first-graders (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jgu:wpaper:1803

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