Bidding for Nothing? The Pitfalls of Overly Neutral Framing

Duersch Peter, Müller Julia


Zusammenfassung
Neutral framing is a standard tool of experimental economics. However, overly neutral instructions, which lack any contextual clues, can lead to strange behaviour. In a contextless second-price auction for a meaningless good, a majority of subjects enter positive bids - likely a case of cognitive experimenter demand effect. Subjects may interpret the lack of context as being tasked with bidding in the experiment. Adding another auction that has a context drastically reduces the positive bids in the meaningless auction.



Publikationstyp
Forschungsartikel (Zeitschrift)

Begutachtet
Ja

Publikationsstatus
Veröffentlicht

Jahr
2017

Fachzeitschrift
Applied Economics Letters

Band
24

Ausgabe
17

Seiten
932-935

Sprache
Englisch

ISSN
1350-4851

DOI