We test experimentally the impact of reducing competitors’ chances of winning (sabotage) on cooperation. Participants compete with or without the sabotage option and play a public good game before and after the exposure to a competitive environment. Contributions to the public good decrease by 9% of the initial endowment when observing pre-post cooperation decisions. Nonetheless, we find no evidence that competition with sabotage further reduces contributions to the public good. Yet, the amount of sabotage received negatively predicts contribution within treated participants.

We study the impact of donation programs on sustaining cooperation after exposure to a competitive environment. We replicate experimental conditions to study the impact of tournament incentives on willingness to cooperate found in Buser and Dreber (2016) and introduce variations in which competition winners can publicly donate to a charity. Our analysis informs on the effectiveness of donation programs in mitigating the potential negative spillover effects of competition on cooperation. We find that competition does not affect cooperation, resulting in the replication being unsuccessful. Furthermore, donation decisions made after a competition reflect winners' prosocial behavior, but they do not change the cooperation of competition losers.

Empirical Study: 

This study investigates the relationship between misinformation and its emotional content, focusing on three dimensions: emotional intensity (overall emotional tone of the content), emotional valence (positive vs. negative emotions), and the emotional intensity associated to specific emotions (anger, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise, and disgust). Leveraging a novel classification method based on OpenAI's pretrained language models, we generate emotion scores for news content from both the perspective of an impartial media assistant and through the lens of Democrat and Republican voters. Our analysis reveals that emotional content is positively associated with misinformation, highlighting the importance of all emotions, but sadness. Furthermore, we observe heterogeneous patterns across simulated political perspectives, with Republican-leaning scores generally showing stronger emotional responses to misinformation than Democrat-leaning scores.

Experimental Study: 

Forthcoming