When does less information translate into more giving to public goods?

Chapter 90 Theoretical Explanations of Treatment Effects in Voluntary Contributions Experiments

Although it is widely recognized that sanction increases cooperation in a public good game, comparatively little attention has been paid to a scenario in which agents have heterogeneous productivities (i.e. asymmetric impact on the group account). This paper examines the extent to which sanction works in this scenario by varying marginal per capita return (MPCR) among group members. Experimental results indicate that in the absence of sanctions, productivity heterogeneity hampers cooperation. Allowing punishment in these groups significantly enhances average contributions of group members, but does not increase welfare. In groups in which cooperation is highly successful, high-productivity agents actively punish low-productivity agents in initial periods. However, conditional on individual contributions, high-productivity agents receive more punishment, and behave more responsively by raising their contributions in the next period. The results mirror the reality in which elites in a society are under higher pressure, since their choices are likely to have a deeper impact on a society.

Coordination and Free-Riding Problems in Blood Donations

Evidence from public good game experiments holds the promise of instructive and cost-effective insights to inform environmental policy-making, for example on climate change mitigation. To fulfill the promise, such evidence needs to demonstrate generalizability to the specific policy context. This paper examines whether and under which conditions such evidence generalizes to voluntary mitigation decisions. We observe each participant in two different decision tasks: a real giving task in which contributions are used to directly reduce CO2 emissions and a public good game. Through two treatment variations, we explore two potential shifters of generalizability in a within-subjects design: the structural resemblance of contribution incentives between the tasks and the role of the subject pool, students and non-students. Our findings suggest that cooperation in public good games is linked to voluntary mitigation behavior, albeit not in a uniform way. For a standard set of parameters, behavior in both tasks is uncorrelated. Greater structural resemblance of the public goods game leads to sizable correlations, especially for student subjects.

In a public goods game, while cooperators need to make contributions, defectors can take a free ride after the realization of the public good. The Nash equilibrium in this game is simply zero contribution from all the players. A conventional approach to encourage cooperation and achieve the public good is using rewards to compensate the difference between the cooperators’ and the defectors’ payoffs. However, the public good may not be realized due to the uncertainty in the game, and the conventional way could underestimate the required rewards to achieve the public good. On the other hand, public good did realize in human history when people cannot survive from a natural disaster, such as a big flood, without cooperating to build a solid embankment, and most of them are willing to choose cooperation without rewards. The realization of the public good leads to the reduction of the defection cost and the contribution, which has a potential to encourage the players’ cooperation. Then the conventional method may overestimate the necessary rewards to realize the public good. In this paper, a public goods game is employed to model the interaction among boundedly rational players with the rewards for large-scale cooperation, and a behavioral game-theoretic approach is developed to describe their decision making processes with the consideration of the risk and impact of public good in the game. It turns out that the conventional rewards to achieve the large-scale cooperation can be reduced for a favorable group of the players.

Does an Economics Education Affect Behavior? Evidence from a Public Goods Experiment

Giving is a Question of Time: Response Times and Contributions to a Real World Public Good

Farmers in developing countries depend on communal natural resources, yet countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are facing the severe degradation of communal lands due to the so-called “tragedy of the commons”. For the sustainable management of common resources, policy interventions, such as farmer seminars, are necessary to ensure high-level cooperation among farmers for land conservation. However, the effects of this type of information provision are not well known. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of the dissemination of conservation information on collaborative communal forest management using an economic field experiment with 936 farmers selected by random sampling from 11 villages in the northern Ethiopian Highlands. We conducted a public goods game experiment using a framework of voluntary contribution to communal land conservation with an intervention to remind participants about the consequence of their behaviors. The results show that the volunteer contribution increased after the intervention, and thereafter the decay of the contribution was slow. The results indicate that providing information about the consequences leads to a higher contribution. The effects of information provision are heterogeneous in terms of social condition, such as access to an urban area and social capital, and individual characteristics, such as wealth. These findings imply that information provision effectively improves farmer collaboration toward natural resource conservation in developing countries.

Public goods, ranging from judiciary to sanitation to parkland, permeate daily life. They have been a subject of intense interdisciplinary study, with a traditional focus being on participation levels in isolated public goods games (PGGs) as opposed to a more recent focus on participation in PGGs embedded into complex social networks. We merged the two perspectives by arranging voluntary participants into one of three network configurations, upon which volunteers played a number of iterated PGGs within their network neighborhood. The purpose was to test whether the topology of social networks or a freedom to express preferences for some local public goods over others affect participation. The results show that changes in social networks are of little consequence, yet volunteers significantly increase participation when they freely express preferences. Surprisingly, the increase in participation happens from the very beginning of the game experiment, before any information about how others play can be gathered. Such information does get used later in the game as volunteers seek to correlate contributions with higher returns, thus adding significant value to public goods overall. These results are ascribable to a small number of behavioral phenotypes, and suggest that societies may be better off with bottom-up schemes for public goods provision.

All prescriptions of behavior for individuals require enforcement. Usually the obligation to behave in a prescribed way is entered into voluntarily by explicit or implicit contract. For example, I promise to teach certain classes with designated frequency and to discuss matters which I, and possibly others, believe are relevant to the course titles. By negotiation, and in the event of its failure, by legal action, I and my employer seek to enforce the contract of employment against large departures from the promised behavior. Performance of some kinds of behavior is difficult or impossible to enforce-such as promises to be creative, noble, or steadfast in crisis-and as a result such contractual promises are either not made or enforced only when there is an uncontroversially flagrant violation. The influence upon contract, and upon economic organization generally, of the costs of enforcing various kinds of contracts has received virtually no study by economists, despite its immense potential explanatory power. When the prescribed behavior is fixed unilaterally rather than by individual agreement, we have the regulation or law, and enforcement of these unilateral rules is the subject of the present essay. Departures of actual from prescribed behavior are crimes or violations, although one could wish for a less formidable description than "criminal" to describe many of the trifling offenses or the offenses against unjust laws. My primary purpose is to construct a theory of rational enforcement, a theory which owes much to Gary Becker's major article on the subject (1968). In the conclusion the problem of explanation, as distinguished from prescription, will be commented upon.

The linear or threshold Public Goods game (PGG) is extensively accepted as a paradigmatic model to approach the evolution of cooperation in social dilemmas. Here we explore the significant effect of nonlinearity of the structures of public goods on the evolution of cooperation within the well-mixed population by adopting Darwinian dynamics, which simultaneously consider the evolution of populations and strategies on a continuous adaptive landscape, and extend the concept of evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) as a coalition of strategies that is both convergent-stable and resistant to invasion. Results show (i) that in the linear PGG contributing nothing is an ESS, which contradicts experimental data, (ii) that in the threshold PGG contributing the threshold value is a fragile ESS, which cannot resist the invasion of contributing nothing, and (iii) that there exists a robust ESS of contributing more than half in the sigmoid PGG if the return rate is relatively high. This work reveals the significant effect of the nonlinearity of the structures of public goods on the evolution of cooperation, and suggests that, compared with the linear or threshold PGG, the sigmoid PGG might be a more proper model for the evolution of cooperation within the well-mixed population.

Coordination and free-riding problems in the provision of multiple public goods

This paper replicates four highly cited, classic lab experimental studies in the provision of public goods. The studies consider the impact of marginal per capita return and group size; framing (as donating to or taking from the public good); the role of confusion in the public goods game; and the effectiveness of peer punishment. Considerable attention has focused recently on the problem of publication bias, selective reporting, and the importance of research transparency in social sciences. Replication is at the core of any scientific process and replication studies offer an opportunity to reevaluate, confirm or falsify previous findings. This paper illustrates the value of replication in experimental economics. The experiments were conducted as class projects for a PhD course in experimental economics, and follow exact instructions from the original studies and current standard protocols for lab experiments in economics. Most results show the same pattern as the original studies, but in all cases with smaller treatment effects and lower statistical significance, sometimes falling below accepted levels of significance. In addition, we document a “Texas effect,” with subjects consistently exhibiting higher levels of contributions and lower free-riding than in the original studies. This research offers new evidence on the attenuation effect in replications, well documented in other disciplines and from which experimental economics is not immune. It also opens the discussion over the influence of unobserved heterogeneity in institutional environments and subject pools that can affect lab results.

We test whether party affiliation or ideological leanings influence subjects' behavior in public goods experiments and trust games. In general, party is unrelated to behavior, and ideology is not related to contributions in the public goods experiment. However, there is some evidence that self-described liberals are both more trusting and more trustworthy.

ObjectiveIrrelevant information, such as one's Social Security number, has been shown to influence decisions in experiments. The objective of this article is to investigate this anchoring effect with respect to the randomly assigned participant number in an economic experiment.MethodsThe game is a public good contribution game. In one session, participants write their participant number on their decision sheet while this number is printed on the decision sheet in the remaining sessions. Anchoring with respect to participant number suggests that those with higher participant numbers contribute more than those with low participant numbers.ResultsI find no evidence of anchoring. In each session, the mean contribution is not significantly different across different partitioning of the subjects according to participant numbers.ConclusionsSocial scientists using experimental methods in research are unlikely to bias results by assigning participant numbers when these numbers coincide with the decision space of the games played.