What If the Essential Were Invisible to Decision-Making? Designing an Interactive Eye-Tracking Study on the Voluntary Contribution Mechanism

In experimental settings, process-tracking techniques are increasingly used to study human decision-making and its impact on decisions and outcomes. This work focuses on the use of eye-tracking to predict eye movements during decision-making and their impact on economic outcomes. Despite its widespread use in other fields, eye-tracking has not been widely adopted in experimental economics. The paper discusses various eye-tracking techniques and devices, especially their applications in economics. It also proposes a novel experimental design using the public goods game as a framework, incorporating eye-tracking to assess participants’ understanding of the instructions and key elements required to make economic decisions. These elements include the amount to be contributed to the common fund, the size of the fund, and the resulting payoff. The study involves a treatment group and a control group, both answering pretest-posttest questions before and after the experiment. Eye-tracking features will be used during the experiment for the treatment group, but not for the control group. The work aims to identify links between comprehension of the instructions and responses by analysing eye movements during the reading phase. The patterns of their gaze shed light on the strategic considerations and cognitive processes underlying their choices. Although the study has limitations, it reflects on the use of eye-tracking in experimental economics and highlights the need for future research.