Eliciting preferences for public goods in non-monetized communities: Accounting for preference uncertainty

One major challenge when conducting contingent valuation studies in developing countries is the choice of the appropriate payment vehicle. Since regular cash-income does not exist for the majority of the population and market integration is low, households in rural areas have less experience with monetary exchanges. In these cases labour time may be a more appropriate payment vehicle. A common finding of studies using labour time as the payment vehicle is that households are more often willing to contribute working time as compared to money. However, so far empirical evidence is missing if the labour time elicitation format reduces respondent’s uncertainty of contributions. In this study we analyze and compare uncertainty of people’s stated willingness to contribute (WTC) time and money for a local public good in a non-monetized small-scale community in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. We do so by establishing an open-ended method for eliciting people’s WTC, the Range-WTC-method, which elicits the upper and lower bound of a person’s WTC. We find that uncertainty is reduced when respondents are asked for labour time contribution instead of monetary contributions. Thus, we provide empirical evidence that, indeed, labour time is the preferred to money in the elicitation of stated WTC in non-monetized communities

Essays on Climate Change and Adaptation in Developing Countries

This dissertation addresses the issue of adaptation and risk in developing countries. It provides macroeconomic insights into the relationship of climate change, violence and agriculture as well as microeconomic analyses of adaptation, that is, analyzing behavior and related decision making processes of individuals exposed to the risks of climate change.Diese Dissertation befasst sich mit den Themen Adaption und Risiko in Entwicklungsländern. Die Arbeit beinhaltet eine makroökonomische Analyse zum Verhältnis von Klimawandel, Gewalt und Landwirtschaft sowie mikroökonomische Analysen zum Anpassungsverhalten von Individuen die vom Klimawandel und dessen Risiken besonders stark betroffen sind

Social image concerns promote cooperation more than altruistic punishment

Human cooperation is enigmatic, as organisms are expected, by evolutionary and economic theory, to act principally in their own interests. However, cooperation requires individuals to sacrifice resources for each other’s benefit. We conducted a series of novel experiments in a foraging society where social institutions make the study of social image and punishment particularly salient. Participants played simple cooperation games where they could punish non-cooperators, promote a positive social image or do so in combination with one another. We show that although all these mechanisms raise cooperation above baseline levels, only when social image alone is at stake do average economic gains rise significantly above baseline. Punishment, either alone or combined with social image building, yields lower gains. Individuals’ desire to establish a positive social image thus emerges as a more decisive factor than punishment in promoting human cooperation.We acknowledge financial support from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research through the project ‘BIOACID (03F0655H)’, the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (grant ECO 2011-23634), the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (project ECO 2015-68469-R), the Universidad Jaume I (P1.1B2015-48) and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. We especially thank our local assistants Eliuda Maravut, Horai Magum, Philippe Hus, Nigel Henry, Saeleah Gordon and Siko Gordon. We thank Vincent Richrath and Irene Jimenez Arribas for research assistance, and Heike Hennig-Schmidt for discussion

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