Public Goods Experiment Research Articles

Conditional cooperation in network public goods experiments

This study investigates the pattern of contribution decisions in a network public goods game. In this game, each player’s payoff depends only on his own contribution and the contributions of his immediate neighbors in a circle network. As in the standard public goods game, we find substantial heterogeneity in behavior across subjects, including both unconditional free-riding and full cooperation, as well as conditional cooperation. We first examine the impact of different information conditions on conditional cooperation. At the aggregate level, we find that players who observe average payoff information about others contribute significantly less than those who observe average contribution information. We then investigate the extent to which conditional cooperators facilitate the spread of cooperation and free-riding behavior across the network. In groups with a single free-rider type, we show that individual contributions decay faster for players who are closer in the network to the free rider. On the other hand, in groups with a single unconditional full contributor type, players do not respond by converging to full cooperation. Instead, we find that proximity to the unconditional full contributor seems only to mitigate (or delay) the typical decline in contributions over time. These contrasting effects are consistent with the widespread claim that conditional cooperation is imperfect, or exhibits a self-serving bias.

Can teaching social dilemmas make people more prosocial? An experiment

ABSTRACTEconomics and business students regularly behave less prosocially than others. Can ethics training reverse this tendency? Results from a repeated public goods experiment reveal that it can. Students who attend an interactive lecture on social dilemmas show significantly more cooperation than others. However, the lecture does not appear to increase the incidence of reciprocal behavior. As many current social problems qualify as social dilemmas, this result stresses the importance of ethics training for policy makers and curriculum designers alike in overcoming the incentive structure of social dilemmas.

Experimental Social Planners: Good Natured, But Overly Optimistic

Public goods are dealt with in two literatures that neglect each other. Mechanism design advises a social planner that expects individuals to misrepresent their valuations. Experiments study the provision of the good when preferences might be non-standard. We introduce the problem of the mechanism design literature into a public good experiment. Valuations for the good are heterogeneous. To each group we add a participant with power to impose a contribution scheme. We study four settings: the authority has no personal interest and (1) valuations are common knowledge or (2) active participants may misrepresent their types; the authority has a personal interest (3) and must decide before learning her own valuation or (4) knows her own valuation. Disinterested social planners predominantly choose a payment rule that gives every group member the same final payoff, even if misrepresentation is possible. Authorities are overly optimistic about truth telling. Interested social planners abuse their power, except if the opportunity cost of a more balanced rule is small.

Conducting Interactive Experiments Online

Online labor markets provide new opportunities for behavioral research, but conducting economic experiments online raises important methodological challenges. This particularly holds for interactive designs. In this paper, we provide a methodological discussion of the similarities and differences between interactive experiments conducted in the laboratory and online. To this end, we conduct a repeated public goods experiment with and without punishment using samples from the laboratory and the online platform Amazon Mechanical Turk. We chose to replicate this experiment because it is long and logistically complex. It therefore provides a good case study for discussing the methodological and practical challenges of online interactive experimentation. We find that basic behavioral patterns of cooperation and punishment in the laboratory are replicable online. The most important challenge of online interactive experiments is participant dropout. We discuss measures for reducing dropout and show that, for our case study, dropouts are exogenous to the experiment. We conclude that data quality for interactive experiments via the Internet is adequate and reliable, making online interactive experimentation a valuable complement to laboratory studies.

Cooperation, Religion and Faith: A Public Goods Experiment

Human cooperation is an evolutionary mystery. People tend to cooperate frequently with genetically unrelated strangers even when reputation gains are small or absent. Religion and/or faith could explain this cooperative behaviour. Therefore, this paper tried to find whether religious and/or faithful individual contribute relatively more than others. The cooperative behaviour creates the problem of free riding, as there are people who will not contribute and feed of others’ cooperation. The solution to this cooperative behaviour is punishment as suggested by previous literature. Therefore, this paper tried to find out whether punishment had any significant impact on increasing cooperation. Results from the experiment showed that religion did not have any significant impact on cooperation. But, there were significant relationship between faith and cooperation. Very faithful individuals seemed to contribute relatively more, whereas less faithful individuals contributed less. Additionally, punishment had significant impact on increasing cooperation.

What are the equilibria in public-good experiments?

Most social-preference models have been tailored to yield only a full-defection equilibrium in one-shot linear public-good situations. This paper determines the Nash-equilibrium sets that result from experiment participants’ elicited preferences. The data show that multiple equilibria are relatively frequent even in a standard three-player setting. In this perspective, the common finding of close-to-omnilateral defection at the end of repeated public-good games is surprising and raises the question of why the dynamics of play seem to select this equilibrium out of the existing equilibria.

Social Norms, Behavioral Payment Programs, and Cooperative Behaviors: Toward a Theory of Financial Incentives in Normative Systems

Descriptive and injunctive social norms communicated among groups are known to influence behavior, yet little is known about how they evolve over time and how financial incentives influence norms. This article tests hypotheses about the ways in which monetary incentives can disrupt normative impact while facilitating cooperative behavior. The results of a public goods experiment indicate that the presence of a financial incentive for behavior can reduce the impact of perceived descriptive norms on behavior, and this reduction continues once the incentive is removed. The findings show that group identification enhances the effects of perceived descriptive norms on contribution behavior. The study results form the basis for theory building on the role of financial incentives in normative systems (FINS).

Framing and Misperception in Public Good Experiments

AbstractEarlier studies have found that framing has a substantial impact on the degree of cooperation observed in public good experiments. We show that the way the public good game is framed affects misperceptions about the incentives of the game. Moreover, we show that such framing‐induced differences in misperceptions are linked to the framing effect on subjects' cooperation behavior. When we do not control for the different levels of misperceptions between frames, we observe a significant framing effect on subjects' cooperation preferences. However, this framing effect becomes insignificant once we remove subjects who misperceive.

Asymmetric network monitoring and punishment in public goods experiments

We extend the recent experimental literature on incomplete punishment networks in linear public goods games. In these games, we use an exogenous network to restrict both monitoring and the set of feasible punishment flows. In addition to two baseline structures (the Complete network and the Circle network), we examine a novel Asymmetric network in which both punishment responsibility and exposure differ across players. Average contributions are significantly lower in the Asymmetric network, driven entirely by the under-monitored player who faces only one potential punisher. We formulate and examine the hypothesis that asymmetry among a player's potential punishment targets may lead to discriminatory patterns of punishment. In particular, players might wish to punish targets for whom they are solely responsible discriminately more than targets for whom they share responsibility. The experimental data do not support this hypothesis, although they do suggest a compelling explanation as to why. Specifically, we find that the under-monitored player in the network retaliates against previous punishment significantly more often than others in the group, which deters their only potential punisher from issuing stronger sanctions. Thus, an additional complication of asymmetry in the network is that it may lead to more instances of anti-social retaliation, inhibiting the effectiveness of the decentralized punishment institution.

Smaller Saami Herding Groups Cooperate More in a Public Goods Experiment.

Group living often entails a balance between individual self-interest and benefits to the group as a whole. Situations in which an individual’s vested interests conflict with collective interests are known as social dilemmas (Kollock 1998). More formally, a theoretical game becomes a social dilemma when an equilibrium of dominant strategies leads to worse outcomes for all players compared to a more cooperative but non-equilibrium strategy (Zelmer 2003; Cardenas and Carpenter 2008). For example, arms races, climate change, the Cold War, credit markets, eBay, exploitation of fisheries, irrigation scheduling, overpopulation, pollution, price wars, voting, water supply and welfare states all give rise to social dilemmas (Kollock 1998; Wydick 2008). Researchers have identified various mutually inclusive routes to solving social dilemmas, including interacting with kin and/or cooperative individuals, communication, coordination, exclusion, institutions, leadership, legislation, mobility, monitoring, parcelling out cooperation or access to resources, partner choice, partner control, policing, punishment, repeated reciprocal interactions, rewards, sanctions, and social norms (Trivers 2005; West et al.2007; Levin 2014; Raihani and Bshary 2015). Social dilemmas pervade the pastoralist way of life. Individual herders must balance their interests (e.g., generating income and managing the inherent risks of pastoralism) with the interests of their herding group and the wider community facing similar challenges (Naess et al.2012; Naess and Bardsen 2015). Pastoralists such as Saami reindeer herders in Norway face social dilemmas across a range of scales and have a variety of individual and collective strategies for solving them.

Payment procedure in a public good game experiment: The effects of endowment timing, tangibility, and source.

Payment procedure in a public good game experiment: The effects of endowment timing, tangibility, and source.

Gender Differences for Public Good Contributions by Competitive versus Group Work Environments

Using a between-subjects design we compare the effect of competitive and cooperative work tasks in the lab on subsequent public good investments. We remove potential reciprocal behavior by having the work tasks occur with separate subjects outside the lab and a one-shot public good experiment with subjects in the lab. We find that individuals in cooperative (group pay) treatments contribute more than individuals in competitions, but these differences are entirely driven by female participants. Women contribute significantly less after competitive tasks and more after group pay tasks while men’s public good contributions are not significantly different. The difference is large for females who contribute 78% more after the group pay treatment compared to competitions. The results suggest that women are more affected by work environments than men and that competitive work environments lead women to contribute less to public goods even outside the workplace.

Race for Power in Public Good Games with Unequal, Unstable Punishment Power

AbstractDecentralized punishment can maintain contributions to a public good at a high level. This positive effect holds even for situations involving inequality in punishment power, meaning that the relative costs for punishment differ between persons. We extend this line of research by examining the additional influence of instability of and thus potential competition for punishment power in public good experiments. As in previous research, inequality is operationalized by assigning the role of a ‘strong player’ to one group member, who can punish others at a reduced cost compared to other players. Instability is operationalized by the fact that the role assignment can change across rounds and is contingent on behavior in previous rounds. Three experiments show that under unequal, unstable (punishment‐) power, individuals behave more competitively and engage in a race for power resulting in detrimental effects for the group. Specifically, we find that (i) unstable power goes along with a disproportionate use of punishment; (ii) not inequality by itself but rather the combination of instability and inequality causes this effect; and (iii) this excessive use of punishment is found not only when the role of the strong player is assigned to individuals who previously behaved rather selfishly but also when prosocial behavior leads to the top, speaking for a generalizability of our findings. Implications for organizational settings are discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The sound of cooperation: Musical influences on cooperative behavior.

SummaryMusic as an environmental aspect of professional workplaces has been closely studied with respect to consumer behavior while sparse attention has been given to its relevance for employee behavior. In this article, we focus on the influence of music upon cooperative behavior within decision‐making groups. Based on results from two extended 20‐round public goods experiments, we find that happy music significantly and positively influences cooperative behavior. We also find a significant positive association between mood and cooperative behavior. Consequently, while our studies provide partial support for the relevance of affect in relation to cooperation within groups, we also show an independently important function of happy music that fits with a theory of synchronous and rhythmic activity as a social lubricant. More generally, our findings indicate that music and perhaps other atmospheric variables that are designed to prime consumer behavior might have comparably important effects for employees and consequently warrant closer investigation. Copyright © 2016 The Authors Journal of Organizational Behavior Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Stimulating Contributions to Public Goods through Information Feedback: Some Experimental Results.

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.

Partner Selection in Public Goods Experiments

This paper studies the effect of introducing costly partner selection for the voluntary contribution to a public good. Subjects participate in six sequences of five rounds of a two-person public good game in partner design. At the end of each sequence subjects can select a new partner out of six group members. Unidirectional and bidirectional partner selection mechanisms are introduced and compared to controls with random partner rematching. Results demonstrate significantly higher contributions in correspondence to unidirectional partner selection than to bidirectional selection and random rematching. Average monetary valuation of being able to choose a partner is substantially high and remains stable.

The difference between Partners and Strangers designs in public goods experiments

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on conditional cooperation and investigate whether the difference in contributions between Partners and Strangers designs in linear public goods experiments can be explained by differences in beliefs. Design/methodology/approach – The author conducted linear public goods experiments by using Partners and Strangers designs with belief eliciting their group member’s contributions. Findings – The author shows that the difference in the magnitude of the responsiveness of contribution to belief (i.e. the marginal contribution to belief) creates different contribution levels in Partners and Strangers designs. Research limitations/implications – The presented results imply that having a strategic motive increases contributions by increasing the magnitude of the responsiveness of contribution to belief rather than by raising belief level. Originality/value – The main claim of this paper is that “marginal contribution to belief” rather than “belief level” causes the difference in contribution levels between Partners and Strangers. This is the first proven evidence of a difference in belief between Partners and Strangers.

Mandatory minimum contributions, heterogeneous endowments and voluntary public-good provision

In a public-good experiment with heterogeneous endowments, we investigate if and how the contribution level as well as the previously observed “fair-share” rule of equal contributions relative to one's endowment (Hofmeyr et al., 2007; Keser et al., 2014) are influenced by minimum-contribution requirements. We consider three different schedules: FixMin, requiring the same absolute contributions, RelMin, requiring the same relative contributions, and ProgMin, requiring minimum contributions that progressively increase with the endowment. We find that minimum contributions exert norm-giving character and may lead to an increase in average group contributions. This is especially true for the progressive schedule. On the individual level, this schedule leads to higher relative contributions by the wealthier players and thus violates the “fair-share” norm. On the group level, it leads to the highest contribution level and the lowest inequality in total profits as measured by the Gini index.

Public disclosure for carbon abatement: African decision-makers in a PROPER public good experiment

A linear public good experiment adopted from Holt and Laury [1997. Classroom games: Voluntary provision of a public good. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 11(4), 209–215.] has been employed to investigate strategic behaviour in pollution abatement among African climate decision-makers. The experiment consisted of three groups, of which groups 2 and 3 received one and two treatments, respectively. The first treatment entailed publicly disclosing the pollution of each member of a group by placing a corresponding colour-coded card in front of each subject, while the second involved the withdrawal of the public disclosure. Group 2 received the first treatment; Group 3 received both the first and second treatments in succession. We found that the untreated group (baseline) polluted more than the two treated groups, and there was no statistically significant difference between the pollution abatement of the two treated groups. These results suggest that public disclosure potentially drives pollution abatement and that its eventual withdrawal does not obliterate abatement behaviour. We did not observe conditional cooperation but average pollution declined over time. Furthermore, individuals who thought it was unfair for Africa to reduce emissions polluted more. We also found that pollution levels differ significantly between males and females.

Is there a hidden cost of imposing a minimum contribution level for public good contributions?

We examine the effects of either exogenously imposing or endogenously letting subjects choose whether to impose minimum contribution levels (MCLs) in a linear public goods experiment using the strategy method. Our results on contribution levels to the public goods are fairly independent of how MCLs are imposed. We find that the main effect of an MCL on unconditional contributions is that it increases low contribution levels to the MCL imposed, while the effect of those contributing more than the MCL before its introduction depends on the size of the MCL. Unexpectedly, there is much more crowding out for a low MCL than for a relatively high MCL. However, the distribution of contribution types is stable across different MCLs.