Revocable commitments to public goods provision under the real‐time protocol of play

Abstract

AbstractUsing the real‐time protocol of play—a relatively new experimental mechanism in which the order of play and timing of decisions are determined endogenously—we investigate voluntary contributions to the provision of pure public goods. We consider the case where the good is binary, players are asymmetric, communication is prohibited, and all‐or‐none contributions to the public good can be withdrawn at any time during the round of play. Our results: (1) support an equilibrium in which contributors maximize the sum of their own payoffs; (2) show considerably higher levels of contribution than under the more commonly used simultaneous protocol of play; and (3) exhibit no decrease in level of contribution across multiple iterations of the stage game. On comparing our results to those of Goren et al. (2003), we conclude that modifying the mechanism so that contributions once made cannot be revoked yields significantly higher levels of contribution over the course of the game. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.