Visibility of Contributions and Cost of Information: An Experiment on Public Goods

Anya Savikhin () and Roman Sheremeta
Additional contact information
Anya Savikhin: Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory, The University of Chicago
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Anya Savikhin Samek

Working Papers from Chapman University, Economic Science Institute

Abstract: We experimentally investigate the impact of visibility of information about contributors on contributions in the public goods game. We systematically consider several treatments that are similar to a wide range of situations in practice. First, we vary the cost of viewing identifiable information about contributors. Second, we vary recognizing all, top or bottom contributors. We find that recognizing all contributors significantly increases contributions relative to the baseline. Recognizing only the top contributors is not significantly different from not recognizing contributors, but recognizing only the bottom contributors is as effective as recognizing all contributors. When viewing information about contributors is costly, there is no significant difference in contributions as compared to the case where all contributors are displayed by default. This effect holds even though the identities of contributors are viewed less than ten percent of the time.

Keywords: public-goods; information; competition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-pbe and nep-pub
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.chapman.edu/ESI/wp/Savikhin-Sheremeta-VisibilityofContributions.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Visibility of Contributors and Cost of Information: An Experiment on Public Goods (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:chu:wpaper:10-22

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Chapman University, Economic Science Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Megan Luetje ().