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# **Experimental Design and Hypotheses**

Our experimental design and subject pool allow us to address three questions that emerge from this discussion. First, do more pro-social or mission-oriented employees actually exert more effort on behalf of the mission, generating benefits for society? Second, do high public sector wages induce less pro-social individuals to enter the public sector? And, third, are the individuals who select into non-caring, central government positions more pro-social than those who select into the private sector?

Testing these hypotheses requires an accurate measure of pro-social behavior. However, pro-social behavior can be defined in different, reasonable ways. For example, individuals manifest pro-social behavior when they make sacrifices to provide direct assistance to people they know or to people they do not know; to people from their locality or ethnic group, similar to the World Values Surveys question used in Dur and Zoutenbier (2011), or to people more physically or socially distant from themselves; and when they provide assistance directly to individuals or indirectly, by donating to organizations that, in turn, assist anonymous individuals.

Our aim is to capture pro-social behavior that is most relevant to employees in the “noncaring” government workplace. First, since their actions have only an indirect effect on citizen welfare, we assess pro-social behavior by measuring donations to an organization that, in turn, provides assistance to anonymous individuals. Second, the reach of the organization should match the jurisdiction of the employees’ own organization. Since our focus is the behavior of workers in the government of Indonesia, the organization should therefore have a national reach. Third, the organization should have no ideological attractiveness to potential donors apart from the work it does in providing assistance to Indonesians. Fourth, the organization should be well-known, such that potential donors are all equally familiar with it.

There are few such organizations in Indonesia. In fact, after canvassing broadly, we found only one, the Indonesian Red Cross Society. The mission of the Indonesian Red Cross is not specific to any particular region or type of problem, but rather a general charity that assists with disaster-relief, ambulance services, climate change, disaster preparedness, water, sanitation, HIV/AIDS, Avian FLU and blood donation, among other activities.<sup>7</sup> To measure pro-social behavior, we asked subjects to play a version of the standard dictator “game.” Normally, it is played with two players, one of whom is given an endowment of $X. The first player can transfer any proportion of the $X to the other player. Standard results for this game show that individuals (on average) give about 10% of their endowment to the other player (Hoffman et al. 1994; Eckel and Grossman, 1996). We change the standard setup by replacing the second player with the Indonesian Red Cross Society.<sup>8</sup> Subjects were asked to donate as much as they liked out of an endowment of 2000 tokens (equal to 16,666 IDR or $1.78) to a charity, the Indonesian Red Cross. Income per capita in Indonesia is approximately $3,000; this amount is approximately 20

> 7 Previous research has also used charitable organizations in dictator games.  Eckel and Grossman (1996) find, for example, that subjects give substantially more when the anonymous recipient is replaced with a charity (in their case, the American Red Cross).  See also Carpenter et al. (2008) and Li et al. (2011).

> 8 A large literature in behavioral economics uses the dictator game as its core measure of altruism and pro-sociality (Forsythe et al 1994; Eckel and Grossman, 1996; Whitt and Wilson, 2007; among many others).  Previous research has also replaced the recipient of the dictator game from a student to a charitable organization (Eckel and Grossman, 1996; Li et al, 2010; Carpenter et al. 2008, among others).