Experimental Study On Free‐riding Behavior In Community Donation For Epidemic Prevention

When novel coronavirus broke out in 2020,people’s life and health were seriously threatened,and economic operation was once stagnant.Community is the cell of society and the strong fortress of epidemic prevention and control.In addition to government support,extensive mobilization of community residents to donate money and materials is also an important force to prevent and control the epidemic.However,due to the public goods characteristics of community public health environment,free-riding behavior is inevitable in epidemic prevention donations.In this paper,we use the method of experimental economics to study the influence of information disclosure and social network density on free-riding behavior in community epidemic prevention donations,and put forward corresponding policy suggestions according to the research conclusions.Taking the non-mandatory disclosure of information as the experimental premise,that is,only the relevant information of participating donors is disclosed,without imposing any external constraints.Based on the analysis of psychological motivation,people’s psychological motivation can be rationally utilized by setting different information disclosure methods,so as to achieve the goal of reducing the level of hitchhiking.Network density will affect the psychological motivation of collective members to a great extent,so it is included in the analysis as an influencing factor.On the basis of theoretical analysis of psychological motivation,this paper puts forward experimental hypothesis,which is proved by experimental data.Based on the framework of “private account-public account”,this paper designed five groups of experiments for high and low network density experimental groups,namely,closed information,only open donor name,only open donation amount,completely open information and mixed information disclosure,to study the influence of different information disclosure methods and network density on free-riding behavior in community epidemic prevention donation.FRI index and MFRI index are used as indicators to measure individual and collective free-riding behavior;Analyze the social network density through ucinet software;Friedman test,T test and Z test were used to process the data of each experimental group.Finally,it is found that the information disclosure mechanism will significantly affect the free-riding behavior in community donation for epidemic prevention,only disclosing the name of the donor can reduce the free-riding level,and only disclosing the donation amount will aggravate the free-riding behavior.The impact of information disclosure on the free-riding level is uncertain.Due to the influence of collective network density,mixed information disclosure can reduce the free-riding level more effectively.Social network density will also significantly affect free-riding behavior in community donation for epidemic prevention.High social network density can restrain free-riding behavior more than low social network density,and the control effect of information disclosure mechanism on free-riding behavior is more sustainable under high network density.According to the above conclusions,this paper puts forward some policy suggestions to reduce hitchhiking behavior from two aspects: adopting information disclosure reasonably and improving network density.