In an experiment designed to test for expressive voting, Tyran (JPubEc 2004) found a strong positive correlation between the participants approval for a proposal to donate money for charity and their expected approval rate for fellow voters. This phenomenon can be due to bandwagon voting or a false consensus effect. The social science literature reports both effects for voting decisions. Replicating Tyran's experiment and adding new treatments, we provide evidence for a false consensus effect but find no support for bandwagon voting.
Private and collective enterprises are expected to increase overall efficiency in transitional China, partly because they are more efficient than state owned enterprises. More importantly, this paper argues, they induce efficiency gains in state owned enterprises and the economy as a whole. Empirical evidence from 28 Chinese provinces between 1993 and 1998 gives support to this hypothesis by showing that the activity levels of private enterprises and rural collective enterprises have a positive effect on regional labor productivity.