Moral hazard,risk seeking,and free riding

This article reports on a laboratory study of moral hazard in insurance markets. The experimental literature on the provision of public goods suggests that agents often sacrifice their narrowly defined self-interest for the good of the group. However, in those experiments, losses are deterministic. We find cooperation in experiments with stochastic losses to be much lower than in otherwise identical experiments with deterministic losses. We argue that the combination of risk seeking and free riding under stochastic returns to investment in loss control makes moral hazard particularly problematic for insurance markets.