Ulrik H. Nielsen publishes paper in Economics Letters

We use the strategy method to classify subjects into cooperator types in a large-scale online Public Goods Game and find that free riders spend more time on making their decisions than conditional cooperators and other cooperator types. This result is robust to reversing the framing of the game and is not driven by free riders lacking cognitive ability, confusion, or natural swiftness in responding. Our results suggest that conditional cooperation serves as a norm and that free riders need time to resolve a moral dilemma.

The paper, "Second Thoughts on Free Riding", is forthcoming in Economics Letters and is joint work with Jean-Robert Tyran (U. Vienna and U. Copenhagen) and Erik Wengström (U. Lund and U. Copenhagen).