Essays on Experimental Economics for the Environment and Economics of Privacy

Im 21. Jahrhundert bestehen zwei Hauptherausforderungen der ökonomischen Forschung darin, effektive Lösung für die Gestaltung der digitalen Transformation und für die Eindämmung des menschengemachten Klimawandels aufzuzeigen. Die Forschung zur digitalen Transformationen ist eng mit verschiedenen Datenschutz- (oder Privatsphäre-)relevanten Fragestellungen verbunden, die sich vorwiegend auf die Präferenzen und Entscheidungen von Einzelpersonen beziehen. Im Gegensatz dazu befasst sich die Forschung zum Klimawandel damit, welche Faktoren eine effektive Kooperation zwischen mehreren Individuen erschweren und wie gemeinsame Ziele, wie die Begrenzung des Klimawandels, erreicht werden können. Die Verbindung zwischen Datenschutz- und Umweltökonomie besteht darin, dass viele digitale Technologien das Potential haben, positive externe Effekte zu erzeugen, die zur Bereitstellung oder Erhaltung öffentlicher Güter beitragen können. Oftmals sind diese digitalen Technologien jedoch dadurch gekennzeichnet, dass ihre Nutzung die Offenlegung persönlicher Informationen erfordert. Der potentielle Erfolg dieser Technologien und institutionellen Mechanismen hängt daher weitgehend von der gesellschaftlichen Akzeptanz gegenüber diesen Technologien und institutionellen Mechanismen ab. Jeder Artikel in dieser kumulativen Dissertation leistet einen Beitrag zu der übergeordneten Fragestellung, inwiefern ökonomische Experimente dazu beitragen können, die Effizienz von Institutionen und Technologien, die öffentliche Güter bereitstellen oder erhalten können, zu evaluieren und potentiell zu steigern. Im ersten Artikel wird untersucht, ob der Publikationsprozess von Fachzeitschriften im Bereich der experimentellen Ökonomik verbessert werden kann. Die weiteren fünf Artikel befassen sich direkt oder indirekt mit unterschiedlichen, aber miteinander verbundenen Problemstellungen zu öffentlichen Gütern, die eng mit Fragen zum Datenschutz oder Umweltfragen verbunden sind. Methodisch sind die sechs Artikel dadurch gekennzeichnet, dass sie die experimentelle Methode entweder direkt für ihre individuellen Forschungsfragen anwenden oder die Ergebnisse der experimentellen Literatur nutzen, um Hypothesen abzuleiten und empirische Ergebnisse in spezifischen Datenschutz-relevanten Kontexten zu erklären. Im Bereich des Datenschutzes werden in der Dissertation Faktoren identifiziert, die die Weitergabe von Daten in verschiedenen Smartphone-Apps aus Schlüsselindustrien der digitalen Transformation und auf Arbeitgeberbewertungsplattformen beeinflussen. Im Bereich der Umweltökonomie wird im ersten Artikel ein institutioneller Mechanismus vorgeschlagen, IV der die Bereitschaft erhöhen kann, zu Recyclingsystemen beizutragen und im zweiten Artikel wird gezeigt, dass die Möglichkeit, ein öffentliches Gut auszubeuten, die Kooperation zur Eindämmung des Klimawandels erschweren kann.In the 21st century, two main challenges for economic research are to propose effective solutions to shape the digital transformation and mitigate human-induced climate change. Research on digital transformation is closely linked to various privacy-related issues, which mostly relate to the preferences and decisions of individuals. In contrast, climate change research examines which factors impede effective cooperation among multiple individuals and investigates how common goals, such as limiting climate change, can be achieved. The link between economics of privacy and environmental economics is that many digital technologies have the potential to generate positive externalities that can contribute to the provision or maintenance of public goods. However, in many cases these digital technologies are characterized by the fact that their use requires the disclosure of personal information. The potential success of these technologies and institutional mechanisms therefore largely depends on social acceptance towards these technologies and institutional mechanisms. Each paper in this cumulative dissertation contributes to the broader question of how economic experiments can contribute to evaluate and potentially increase the efficiency of institutions and technologies that can provide or maintain public goods. The first paper investigates whether the publication process of journals in the field of experimental economics can potentially be improved. The remaining five papers focus directly or indirectly on different but related public goods problems which are closely linked to privacy or environmental issues. Methodologically, the six papers share the feature that they either directly apply the experimental method for their individual research questions or use the results of experimental literature to derive hypotheses and explain empirical outcomes in specific privacy-related contexts. In the field of privacy, the dissertation identifies factors that influence data sharing in several smartphone apps from key industries of the digital transformation and on employer review platforms. In the area of environmental economics, the first paper proposes an institutional mechanism that can increase the willingness to contribute to recycling systems, and the second paper shows that the ability to exploit a public good can impede cooperation to mitigate climate change

Combating climate change: Is the option to exploit a public good a barrier for reaching critical thresholds? Experimental evidence

The achievement of collective climate targets is hampered by a large number of factors. Most obvious is the conflict between self-interest and group interest at both the intra- and intergenerational level. Several experimental studies examine the effects of factors such as wealth heterogeneity, varying thresholds, or time discounting on the probability of achieving a collective climate target. In these experiments, participants act as a group and can invest money in a collective group account over a fixed number of rounds. If the group account is below a threshold after the last round, the members of a group usually lose a large proportion of their potential assets. However, in the real world, agents can not only invest in public goods, but also exploit them. We therefore study cooperation dynamics in a threshold climate change experiment in which group members can not only contribute money into their group account, but also take money out of it. We induce endowment heterogeneity by simulating the contribution decisions in the first rounds of the experiment and vary the loss rate between treatments. Our results show no significant differences between give and give-take treatments. Consistent with the results of previous studies, we find that with a lower loss rate, less groups reach the threshold

Recycling behavior of private households: an empirical investigation of individual preferences in a club good experiment

While recycling helps to limit the use of primary resources, it also requires considerable technological investments in regional circular flow systems. The effectiveness of recycling systems, however, also depends on household behavior. Therefore, current research increasingly focuses on behavioral and psychological theories of altruism, moral behavior, and social preferences. From an economic perspective, recycling systems can be understood as public goods with contributions resulting in positive externalities. In this context, the literature shows that recycling behavior highly depends on the perception of how others behave. In neutrally framed public good experiments, contributions tend to increase when alternative public goods are offered and group identity is generated. We aim to contribute to this discussion by observing household behavior concerning recycling opportunities in controlled settings. For this purpose, we study a laboratory experiment in which individuals con‑tribute to recycling systems: At first, only one public recycling system (public good) is offered. After dividing societies into two clubs, “high” and “low” according to their environmental attitudes, excludable club systems (club goods) are added as alternative recycling options for each club. The results of our pilot experiment show that adding a more exclusive recycling club option increases individual contributions to recycling compared with a pure public good framework. However, this increase in cooperation is only significant for those clubs where members with higher environmental attitudes are pooled

Editorial favoritism in the field of laboratory experimental economics

We examine scientific quality and editorial favoritism in the field of experimental economics. We use a novel data set containing all original research papers (N=569) that exclusively used laboratory experiments for data generation and were published in the American Economic Review (AER), Experimental Economics (EE), or the Journal of the European Economic Association (JEEA) between 1998 and 2018. Several quantifiable proxies for scientific quality indicate that experiments conducted in Europe trump experiments conducted in the US: European experiments rely on larger numbers of participants as well as participants per treatment and receive more citations. For the AER and the JEEA, but not for EE, we find that papers authored by economists with social ties to the editors receive significantly fewer citations in the years following publication. Detailed analyses using a novel dynamic and continuous measure of the co-authorship distance between editors and authors suggest that authors at longer distances to editors have to write papers of higher quality in order to get published in the AER and the JEEA. We find no evidence that this ‘uphill battle’ is associated with geographical distance

Is Your Privacy for Sale? An Experiment on the Willingness to Reveal Sensitive Information

We investigate whether individuals’ self-stated privacy behavior is correlated with their reservation price for the disclosure of personal and potentially sensitive information. Our incentivized experiment has a unique setting: Information about choices with real implications could be immediately disclosed to an audience of fellow first semester students. Although we find a positive correlation between respondents’ willingness to accept (WTA) disclosure of their private information and their stated privacy behavior for some models, this correlation disappears when we change the specification of the privacy index. Independent of the privacy index chosen we find that the WTA is significantly influenced by individual responses to personal questions, as well as by different decisions to donate actual money, indicating that the willingness to protect private information depends on the delicacy of the information at stake