Abstract
In traditional public good experiments participants receive an endowment from the experimenter that can be invested in a public good or kept in a private account. In this paper we present an experimental environment where participants can invest time during five days to contribute to a public good. Participants can make contributions to a linear public good by logging into a web application and performing virtual actions. We compared four treatments, with different group sizes and information of (relative) performance of other groups. We find that information feedback about performance of other groups has a small positive effect if we control for various attributes of the groups. Moreover, we find a significant effect of the contributions of others in the group in the previous day on the number of points earned in the current day. Our results confirm that people participate more when participants in their group participate more, and are influenced by information about the relative performance of other groups.
Highlights
There is a substantial understanding of the conditions that lead to successful governance of the commons by small groups such as communities [1]
This paper presented the first results of a new experimental environment where participants invest time in the public good during a period of days
Adding a leaderboard to the experiment had a small positive effect if we control of group attributes such as the number of chat messages and likes as well as group size
Summary
There is a substantial understanding of the conditions that lead to successful governance of the commons by small groups such as communities [1]. Studies in small-scale communities and in controlled experiments [2] show that the strength of groups in overcoming collective action problems lies in whether or not participants can communicate, whether they have input in the creation of the rules, whether there is group homogeneity, and whether institutional arrangements are monitored and enforced. In small-scale communities, participants have relatively low costs in deriving information to determine the trustworthiness of others. Small communities are characterized by low participant costs for monitoring others’ behavior, as well as low costs for face-to-face meetings. The low costs of monitoring behavior and conducting faceto-face meetings are not generally possible at a large scale. Identifying how to scale up the insights that lead to success at the community level to larger scale collective action problems
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