Value Orientations, Income and Displacement Effects, and Voluntary Contributions

Identifying the value orientations of subjects participating in market or non-market decisions by having them participate in decomposed games may be helpful in understanding the behaviour of these subjects. This experiment presents the results of changes in the centre and the radius of a value orientations ring in an attempt to discover if the value orientations resulting from a ring game exhibit income or displacement effects. Two sets of subjects, 113 from the first and 96 from the second participated in the first two treatments and 72 from the second set of subjects participated in the third and fourth treatments. While the resulting distributions of value orientations are significantly different across the two sets of subjects when the treatments are common, neither significant income effects nor displacement effects are identified. However, an external validity check with a voluntary contribution game provides evidence of a displacement effect. Value orientations from rings centred around the origin of the decision-space explain significant portions of voluntary contributions while value orientations from displaced rings do not.