Eye Movements, Choice Behaviors in the Prisoner's Dilemma Games and Willingness to Pay for a Public Good

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to clarify subjects’ ways of thinking and information acquisition methods when making their private and public decisions by conducting experiments using an eye-tracking system and a questionnaire survey. We divided our subjects into several groups based on their willingness to pay for the preservation of a public good and analyzed the relationship between choice behaviors in 2×2 prisoner’s dilemma games and eye-movement patterns for each group. We found that subjects have different information acquisition methods for each way of thinking about the preservation of public goods when making private decisions. Thus, this study demonstrates one method for predicting subjects’ ways of thinking about the preservation of public goods by observing their information acquisition methods in prisoner’s dilemma games with eye-tracking systems in a specific group.

Keywords: Eye Movements, Information Acquisition, PD Games, WTP

JEL Classification: C91, C72