Reportgreen2000

Are people conditionally cooperative?: evidence from a public goods experiment

Urs Fischbacher · Simon Gächter · Ernst Fehr

64 citations0/0 files storedRepository for Publications and Research Data (ETH Zurich)

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Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies Game Theory and Voting Systems Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation

Abstract

We investigate to what extent contribution decisions to a public good depend on the contributions of others. We employ a novel experimental technique that allows us to elicit people's willingness to be conditionally cooperative, i.e., to contribute more to the public good the more the other beneficiaries contribute. We find that about a third of subjects' contribution schedules is characterized by complete free-riding. However, a majority of 50 percent of the subjects displays conditional cooperation. Our results can explain why in most repeated public goods experiments subjects initially cooperate while towards the final periods cooperation declines to very low levels

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Cited by

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