Divided Loyalties or Conditional Cooperation? An experimental study of contributions to multiple public goods

Matthew McCarter (), Anya Samak and Roman Sheremeta
Additional contact information
Anya Samak: School of Human Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Roman Sheremeta: Argyros School of Business and Economics, Chapman University

Working Papers from Chapman University, Economic Science Institute

Abstract: It is common in organizational life to be simultaneously involved in multiple collective actions. These collective actions may be modeled using public good dilemmas. The developing social dilemma literature has two perspectives – the “divided loyalties” and “conditional cooperation” perspectives – that give opposite predictions about how individuals will behave when they simultaneously play two identical public good games. The current paper creates consensus between these social dilemma perspectives by examining cooperative behavior of participants interacting in two public good games with either different or the same group members. In each round, individuals have a common budget constraint across the two games. In support of the conditional cooperator’s perspective of social dilemmas, we find that playing two games with different, rather than same, group members increases overall contributions. Over the course of the experiment, participants playing two games with different group members shift their contributions significantly more often toward more cooperative public good games than participants playing with the same group members.

Keywords: cooperation; conditional cooperation; public good; experiments; group composition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C73 C91 D03 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-gth, nep-hpe, nep-pub and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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http://www.chapman.edu/research-and-institutions/e ... onal-cooperation.pdf

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Working Paper: Divided Loyalties or Conditional Cooperation? An Experimental Study of Contributions to Multiple Public Goods (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:chu:wpaper:13-08

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