Public Goods Experiment Research Articles

Nudging student recycling behaviour: An experimental study in Kazakhstan and UK higher education

We study the effects of influencing the recycling decisions of young people in the UK and Kazakhstan Universities using a public good experiment with an information nudge (through a video) and a peer effect nudge. Kazakhstan recycles approximately 15% of its municipal waste, compared to almost half in the UK; however, surprisingly, overall contributions are significantly higher from Kazakh students compared to those from UK students. An information video on recycling prompts Kazakh students to contribute more while no such effect is found with the UK students. This suggests that Kazakh students may perceive themselves to be more capable of recycling despite a less sophisticated recycling system compared to the UK. A strong peer effect is seen across both countries. The study highlights the importance of subjective norms through peer nudge and the likelihood of higher contributions from students with siblings. A wider implication is that emerging economies’ educational institutions may have latent positive environmental and recycling practices that developed nations could learn from. The study has implications for educational development as well as national recycling policy frameworks.

Long-lasting effects of incentives and social preference: A public goods experiment.

This paper addresses the question of the effectiveness and permanence of temporary incentives to contribute to a public good. Using a common experimental framework, we investigate the effects of a recommendation that takes the form of an exhortative message to contribute, a monetary punishment and a non-monetary reward to sustain high levels of contributions. In particular, we shed light on the differential impact these mechanisms have on heterogeneous types of agents. The results show that all three incentives increase contributions compared to a pre-phase where there is no incentive. Monetary sanctions lead to the highest contributions, but a sudden drop in contributions is observed once the incentive to punish is removed. On the contrary, Recommendation leads to the lowest contributions but maintains a long-lasting impact in the Post-policy phase. In particular, it makes free-riders increase their contribution over time in the post-incentive phase. Finally, non-monetary reward backfires against those who are weakly conditional cooperators. Our findings emphasize the importance of designing and maintaining incentives not only for free-riders, but for strong and weak conditional cooperators as well, depending on characteristics of the incentives.

CO2 Emission reduction – Real public good provision by large groups in the laboratory

Public good experiments are usually conducted in the laboratory using the voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM). We use a real public good (CO2 emission rights) with comparatively large groups (up to 60 subjects) and compare the results with corresponding experiments based on the VCM. Our treatment variations include group size and the feedback that subjects receive after each round. Our data reveal that, in contrast to the VCM, subjects dealing with a real public good relate their decisions to those of their group members in the lab only in the first rounds and do not change their contributions thereafter. These observations suggest that, when faced with a real public good, subjects use the whole group, including “players” outside the lab, as a main reference point. In this way, contributions made to the real public good in the lab tend to depend on the salience of mutual cooperation benefits existing outside the lab. Our findings help to understand the transferability of previous laboratory research on the VCM to real public good provision.

PROMOTING COOPERATION IN A PUBLIC GOOD EXPERIMENT THROUGH OSTRACISM AS A PUNISHMENT MECHANISM

Ostracism is one form of real-life punishment mechanism to penalize uncooperative individuals in many societies. This paper aims to test whether ostracism enhances cooperation in the public good experiment by allowing group members to expel others based on the majority voting rule. The study also employed the modified public good experiment to categorize the contributors. The results showed that introducing ostracism increases contribution level by about 45 percentage points on average. However, some participants punished other members, even they contributed less than others or so-called anti-social punishment, suggesting that a third-party punishment may be another solution to sustain cooperation.

I do, therefore i think it is normal: the causal effects of behavior on descriptive norm formation and evolution

ABSTRACT Social norms theories have guided social science research by predicting how and when social norms influence people’s behavior. However, there are still gaps in our understanding of how social norms are formed, maintained, and changed. It is possible that our own actions shape and perpetuate what we believe is normal. This study tests whether behavior can influence perceptions of what is typical behavior and how this relationship evolves over time. Secondary analysis of data from a multi-round public-goods experiment showed that personal contribution behavior significantly and positively influences perceived descriptive norms; yet, a significant change in the relationship over time was not evidenced. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Does ethnic diversity always undermine pro-social behavior? Evidence from a laboratory experiment

A large body of literature concludes a negative association between ethnic diversity and pro-social behavior. Inspired by the works suggesting that the costly punishment would sustain the contribution level in public goods experiment, we compare the economic behavior of Mongolian- and Han-Chinese and investigate how ethnic diversity would affect contribution, punishment, and the marginal effect of punishment on contribution. We find that the association between ethnic diversity and pro-social behavior is not a simple negative relationship but rather depends on both cultural traits and ethnic fusion when we take punishment opportunity into consideration. Ethnic diversity may help promote contribution, alleviate the punishment level, and increase the efficiency of introducing a punishment mechanism in some circumstances.

Inequality and cooperation: meta-analytical evidence from Public Good Experiments.

Inequality and cooperation: meta-analytical evidence from Public Good Experiments.

Charting the Type Space—The Case of Linear Public Good Experiments

Charting the Type Space—The Case of Linear Public Good Experiments

An unpredictable environment reduces pro-environmental behavior: A dynamic public goods experiment on forest use

Environmental unpredictability is one of the most common global ecological problems, although few studies have explored its effect on pro-environmental behavior (PEB). The present research addresses this gap by viewing PEB as an investment in the environment for the sake of long-term benefits and redesigning the public goods game. For the game, the current public goods game, named the public forest game, is combined with the forest resource game such that investing and curtailing processes could be encompassed in one game in which PEB has direct indicators (some of which were distinguished from cooperation for purely profit-seeking). Participants played the game in fixed groups of five persons for five rounds randomly in either the low or high environmental unpredictability condition, followed by another five rounds in the other condition. The results show that when the environment becomes uncertain and unpredictable, both individual and group pro-environmental behavior decrease. The present research identifies the negative effect of environmental unpredictability on pro-environmental behavior, suggesting that climate change may erect a barrier to sustainable behaviors by increasing environmental unpredictability and highlighting the importance of environmental prediction.

Do risk and competition trigger conditional cooperation? Evidence from public good experiments

AbstractWe investigate the effect of intra‐group competition and risk marginal per capita returns on subjects' cooperative behavior in a one‐shot public good game—following the well‐known approach proposed by Fischbacher, Gächter, and Fehr (2001) and extending the Colasante et al. (2018, 2019) parametrization. We study the interaction between environment and social preferences and test the existence of a causal relationship of risk and competition over cooperative behavior when an individual's benefit of the public good is heterogeneous and uncertain. Our results report experimental evidence about competition fostering cooperative behavior leading to a rise in contribution for all the subjects regardless of their social preferences. However, risk has a detrimental effect on cooperative behavior due to encouraging free riding.

Elite Status, Market Linkages, and Contributions to Collective Goods: Evidence from a Survey and Public Goods Experiments

Cooperation is particularly important in the management of common resources where the user rights of individuals are collective. We used a one-shot public goods experiment to construct a measure of social capital, based on ‘multilateral’ cooperative behaviour, where each participant had free-riding incentives. This study was conducted in four rural villages of Odisha in India in the course of a project studying irrigation. Participants were male farmers from different social groups. Combining survey data with the artefactual field experiments, we examined how an individual’s willingness to contribute to the collective good was affected by social and economic characteristics, and political connections to the local administrative unit. The results suggest interesting differences in cooperation: in the less remote villages, farmers were less cooperative on average compared to farmers living in more remote villages. Furthermore, we found that wealthy and influential farmers invested less in the provision of a public good, reducing the likelihood of successful collective action. The findings are relevant both to the ‘collective action in the commons’ discourse and the literature on using experimental methods to deal with an individual’s true preferences for a public good.

Communication, choice continuity, and player number in a continuous-time public goods experiment

Communication, choice continuity, and player number in a continuous-time public goods experiment

Punishment Strategies across Societies: Conventional Wisdoms Reconsidered

Experiments using the public goods game have repeatedly shown that in cooperative social environments, punishment makes cooperation flourish, and withholding punishment makes cooperation collapse. In less cooperative social environments, where antisocial punishment has been detected, punishment was detrimental to cooperation. The success of punishment in enhancing cooperation was explained as deterrence of free riders by cooperative strong reciprocators, who were willing to pay the cost of punishing them, whereas in environments in which punishment diminished cooperation, antisocial punishment was explained as revenge by low cooperators against high cooperators suspected of punishing them in previous rounds. The present paper reconsiders the generality of both explanations. Using data from a public goods experiment with punishment, conducted by the authors on Israeli subjects (Study 1), and from a study published in Science using sixteen participant pools from cities around the world (Study 2), we found that: 1. The effect of punishment on the emergence of cooperation was mainly due to contributors increasing their cooperation, rather than from free riders being deterred. 2. Participants adhered to different contribution and punishment strategies. Some cooperated and did not punish (‘cooperators’); others cooperated and punished free riders (‘strong reciprocators’); a third subgroup punished upward and downward relative to their own contribution (‘norm-keepers’); and a small sub-group punished only cooperators (‘antisocial punishers’). 3. Clear societal differences emerged in the mix of the four participant types, with high-contributing pools characterized by higher ratios of ‘strong reciprocators’, and ‘cooperators’, and low-contributing pools characterized by a higher ratio of ‘norm keepers’. 4. The fraction of ‘strong reciprocators’ out of the total punishers emerged as a strong predictor of the groups’ level of cooperation and success in providing the public goods.

Inequality, institutions and cooperation

We examine whether the relationship between economic inequality and voluntary cooperation is influenced by the quality of local institutions, as proxied by corruption. We use representative data from a large-scale lab-in-the-field public goods experiment with over 1,300 participants across rural Vietnam. Our results show that inequality adversely affects aggregate contributions due to high endowment individuals contributing a significantly smaller share than those with low endowments. This negative effect of inequality on cooperation is stronger in high corruption environments. We find that corruption is associated with pessimistic beliefs about others’ contributions in heterogeneous groups, highlighting the indirect costs of corruption that are understudied in the literature. These findings have implications for public policies aimed at resolving local collective action problems.

Immigration, integration and cooperation: experimental evidence from a public goods game in Italy

ABSTRACT Immigration has rapidly changed the demographic profile of most Western European societies, increasing their ethnic diversity. Some cross-disciplinary literature comparing homogeneous and diverse communities provides observational evidence of a link between high levels of ethnoracial diversity and lower levels of public goods provision. While these results are often interpreted as driven by context/interaction effects, whereby individuals lower their cooperativeness in response to the presence of non-coethnics, they could also be explained by composition effects – immigrants having different baseline levels of cooperativeness, and thereby lowering average cooperation rates. To disentangle these effects, we conducted a lab-in-the-field experiment with a sample of Italians and immigrants from Morocco and the Philippines residing in Milan. In our public goods experiment, participants were randomly assigned to either homogeneous or ethnically mixed groups. We find that Italians behave similarly in both homogeneous and heterogeneous groups, thus contradicting arguments about the negative effects of diversity on the native population, while there are both compositional and interactional effects when considering the behaviour of Moroccan and Filipino immigrants, respectively. Moreover, differences largely disappear when we consider only the behaviour of more socio-economically integrated immigrants, highlighting the need for a more processual understanding of cooperation in multiethnic communities.

Public good provision and democracy: Evidence from an experiment with farmer groups in Malawi

Farmer groups are the cornerstone of many agricultural projects in low income countries. The success of such projects crucially depends on the ability of group members to cooperate. We conducted a series of public goods experiments to study within-group cooperation in Malawian farmer groups. We combine results from these experiments with survey data and qualitative interviews. Our results shed light on the heterogeneous capacity of groups to cooperate. We find that democratically run groups, in particular those with close social ties, are more cooperative compared to groups with leader-driven decision-making. Focus groups indicate that this democracy is deliberative in nature, characterized by open discussion that aggregates preferences, increases common knowledge, and creates goodwill. A second set of experiments in which we experimentally vary the decision-making processes yields quantitatively similar results in arbitrary groupings of farmers and null results in pre-existing groups with established decision-making procedures, demonstrating the stickiness of institutional rules. Our results imply that group formation and functioning needs to be included in the design phase of agricultural projects in low income countries.

Framing in multiple public goods games and donation to charities.

The vast amount of research devoted to public goods games has shown that contributions may be dramatically affected by varying framing conditions. This is particularly relevant in the context of donations to charities and non-governmental organizations. Here, we design a multiple public goods experiment by introducing five types of funds, each differing in the fraction of the contribution that is donated to a charity. We found that people contribute more to public goods when the associated social donations are presented as indirect rather than as direct donations. At the same time, the fraction of the donations devoted to charity is not affected by the framing. We have also found that, on average, women contribute to public goods and donate to charity significantly more than men. These findings are of potential interest to the design of social investment tools, in particular for charities to ask for better institutional designs from policy makers.

Public good provision, in-group cooperation and out-group descriptive norms: A lab experiment

We use a public good experiment to study how in-group cooperation is affected by payoff-irrelevant information about cooperation in other groups (i.e., descriptive out-group feedback). We find that positive out-group feedback, indicating above-average cooperation, deters low in-group contributors from increasing their contribution towards the in-group average. By contrast, negative out-group feedback, which informs participants about below-average cooperation, deters high in-group contributors from decreasing their contribution towards the in-group average. These two effects work together to dampen contribution patterns associated with conditional cooperation. Further, we show that the effects are stronger for individual-level feedback (comparing individual contributions with the out-group average) than for group-level feedback (comparing total contributions by in-group members with that of other groups). Interestingly, when allowed to avoid out-group feedback information, the propensity to consult the feedback is similar for high and low in-group contributors, suggesting that information acquisition is not always self-serving.

Inequality hinders group efforts to avoid environmental disasters

Abstract Using a threshold public good experiment, we examine how varying degrees of inequality in resources and differences in risk of loss among players affect the success of group efforts to avoid a common loss. We find that when the poor face greater risk than the rich, contributions and success in reaching the threshold decrease with increasing inequality in funds available. This occurs not because the poor do not make a greater effort when they face higher risk but rather because the rich, who control most of the resources, tend to lower their contributions when they face the lower risk, and because a subset of the rich are not averse to inequality. These results highlight the challenges confronting parties in real-world situations, such as forest communities threatened by wildfire or countries confronting climate change, where group efforts are necessary if losses are to be avoided and the parties differ widely in available resources and in the risks they face.

Ethnic trust, minority status, and public goods in post-conflict societies

This study considers how ethnic trust and minority status can impact the ability of ethnic groups to pursue cooperative public goods, focusing on groups with a history of conflict and lingering hostility. A public good experiment between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in postwar Kosovo reveals that subjects contribute far more to a mutually beneficial public good when they are part of an experimentally induced coethnic majority. However, when in the minority, subjects not only underinvest, but many actively divest entirely, privatizing the public good. Majority/minority status also has wide-ranging implications for how individuals relate to real-world public goods and the institutions of government that provide them. Compared to majority Albanians, survey data indicate how minority Serbs in Kosovo express greater safety and security concerns, feel more politically, socially, and economically excluded, are more dissatisfied with civil liberties and human rights protections, and are less likely to participate politically or pay taxes to support public goods. Conflict-related victimization and distrust of out-groups are strong predictors of these minority group attitudes and behaviors. This suggests a mechanism for how conflict amplifies out-group distrust, increasing parochial bias in public good commitments, especially among minorities who are wary of exploitation at the hands of an out-group majority. To restore trust, this study finds that institutional trust and intergroup contact are important to bridging ethnic divides that inhibit public good cooperation.