Behavior In Public Goods Game Research Articles

Examining the Behavior in Public Good Games: An Application of Prisoner’s Dilemma

Standard belief in economic theory asserts that effective public good provision will always be hindered by the presence of free-riders. Yet in contradiction to this, many collective goods have managed to be effectively provided by large bodies of people working together. This begs the question: how prevalent is free-ridership in reality and how well does theory translate into practice? We have tested this theory by subjecting participants to experimental conditions where the impacts of social pressure have been observed via the formation of groups of four. Results have shown that, though individuals are likely to contribute in our treatment condition; even in the absence of social pressure, individuals will willingly donate around 40% of their endowments. This has allowed us to conclude that, in our experiment, the free rider hypothesis is not supported.

Bounded rational agents playing a public goods game.

An agent-based model for human behavior in the well-known public goods game (PGG) is developed making use of bounded rationality, but without invoking mechanisms of learning. The underlying Markov decision process is driven by a path integral formulation of reward maximization. The parameters of the model can be related to human preferences accessible to measurement. Fitting simulated game trajectories to available experimental data, we demonstrate that our agents are capable of modeling human behavior in PGG quite well, including aspects of cooperation emerging from the game. We find that only two fitting parameters are relevant to account for the variations in playing behavior observed in 16 cities from all over the world. We thereby find that learning is not a necessary ingredient to account for empirical data.

The Role of the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex in Public Good and Public Bad Games: Evidence From a tDCS Study.

Although humans constitute an exceptionally cooperative species that is able to collaborate on large scales for common benefits, cooperation remains a longstanding puzzle in biological and social science. Moreover, cooperation is not always related to resource allocation and gains but is often related to losses. Revealing the neurological mechanisms and brain regions related to cooperation is important for reinforcing cooperation-related gains and losses. Recent neuroscience studies have found that the decision-making process of cooperation is involved in the function of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC). In the present study, we aimed to investigate the causal role of the VMPFC in cooperative behavior concerning gains and losses through the application of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). We integrated cooperation-related gains and losses into a unified paradigm. Based on the paradigm, we researched cooperation behaviors regarding gains in standard public good games and introduced public bad games to investigate cooperative behavior regarding losses. Our study revealed that the VMPFC plays different roles concerning gains and losses in situations requiring cooperation. Anodal stimulation over the VMPFC decreased cooperative behavior in public bad games, whereas stimulation over the VMPFC did not change cooperative behavior in public good games. Moreover, participants’ beliefs about others’ cooperation were changed in public bad games but not in public good games. Finally, participants’ cooperative attitudes were not influenced in the public good or public bad games under the three stimulation conditions.

The impact of heterogeneous investments on the evolution of cooperation in public goods game with exclusion

Public goods game as a multi-player social dilemma game plays an important role in studying the emergence of cooperation, which remains an open question. This paper studies the impact of heterogeneous investments on cooperative behavior in public goods game, where players adopting exclusion strategy can exclude defectors from the group. Our research shows that the heterogeneous investment mechanism can significantly promote cooperation. When the cost of exclusion is low, the excluders can obtain higher payoff than other players, which leads that cooperators and excluders coexist and dominate the population. As the cost of exclusion increases, the advantage of excluders weakens and population keeps high cooperation level in some regions of contribution rate ω. For low or middle values of r, the too small or relatively large values of ω will be not beneficial to the evolution of cooperation. For high values of r, a small increase in ω will be beneficial to the evolution of cooperation. This paper provides a new understanding of cooperation under heterogeneous investment mechanism.

The Co-Evolution of Fairness Preferences and Costly Punishment

We study the co-evolutionary emergence of fairness preferences in the form of other-regarding behavior and its effect on the origination of costly punishment behavior in public good games. Our approach closely combines empirical results from three experiments with an evolutionary simulation model. In this way, we try to fill a gap between the evolutionary theoretical literature on cooperation and punishment on the one hand and the empirical findings from experimental economics on the other hand. As a principal result, we show that the evolution among interacting agents inevitably favors a sense for fairness in the form of “disadvantageous inequity aversion”. The evolutionary dominance and stability of disadvantageous inequity aversion is demonstrated by enabling agents to co-evolve with different self- and other-regarding preferences in a competitive environment with limited resources. Disadvantageous inequity aversion leads to the emergence of costly (“altruistic”) punishment behavior and quantitatively explains the level of punishment observed in contemporary lab experiments performed on subjects with a western culture. Our findings corroborate, complement, and interlink the experimental and theoretical literature that has shown the importance of other-regarding behavior in various decision settings.

Inequity Aversion and Individual Behavior in Public Good Games: An Experimental Investigation

We present a simple two-steps procedure for a within-subject test of the inequity aversion model of Fehr and Schmidt (1999). In the first step, subjects played modified ultimatum and dictator games and were classified according to their preferences. In the second step, subjects with specific preferences according to the Fehr and Schmidt model were matched into pairs and interacted with each other in a standard public good game and a public good game with punishment possibility. Our results show that the specific composition of groups significantly influences the subjects’ performance in the public good games. We identify the aversion against advantageous inequity and the information about the coplayer’s type as the main influencing factors for the behavior of subjects.

Strategic behavior in public good games: when partners drift apart

In a public good experiment one group member is replaced by another after a prespecified number of periods. Evidence of both strategic (forward looking) and adaptive (backward looking) behavior is observed.