Instinctiveness and reflexivity in behavioural type variability

Abstract

Experimental economics uses response times (RTs) to evaluate the instinctiveness of choices and behaviours. The experiment proposed in this paper seeks to provide further results about the correlation between RTs and behaviours. We use a repeated public goods game with random re-matching to study (1) the relationship between response times and the stability of individual behavioural types and (2) the relationship between RTs and contribution variability. We identify three behavioural types in a public goods game - free-riders, unconditional cooperators, and conditional cooperators. To define RTs in a round, we use two distinct measures: the time the subject takes to review the previous round's results and the time the subject takes to choose the contribution to the public good in that round. Experimental evidence suggests that longer RTs are linked to higher variability in both behavioural types and contributions in a public goods game. The results show that conditional cooperation is the most reflexive choice: 1) the time used to see the results of the previous round correlates positively with behavioural type variation; 2) the subjects switching from free-riding to conditional cooperation spend more time than the others also when choosing the amount of their contribution to the public good.