The Effect of Disclosing Identities in a Socially Incentivized Public Good Game

Britta Butz and Christine Harbring
Additional contact information
Britta Butz: Chair of Organization, School of Business and Economics, RWTH Aachen University, Templergraben 64, 52062 Aachen, Germany
Christine Harbring: Chair of Organization, School of Business and Economics, RWTH Aachen University, Templergraben 64, 52062 Aachen, Germany

Games, 2021, vol. 12, issue 2, 1-31

Abstract: We investigate whether revealing the identities in a public good game that includes a donation incentive leads to higher contributions to the public good. Previous evidence suggests that contributions to a public good increase significantly when these take place in public. Also, the amount of money given in charitable donations seems to be sensitive to the revealing of identities. Using a laboratory experiment, we implement a 20% donation share that is dependent on participants’ contributions to a public good. The donation is either costless (because it is financed by the experimenter) or deducted from a team’s contributions. In both settings, we explore whether informing participants that group members’ identities will be disclosed at the end of the experiment leads to higher contributions to the public good. Non-parametric statistics indicate that when donations are costly for the participants, the announcement of subsequent identity disclosure results in significantly higher contributions in the second half of the repeated public good game. In contrast, revealing identities in settings with costless donations reduces contributions to the public good significantly. The regression results indicate that conditional cooperators might be one subgroup driving these results.

Keywords: cooperation; social dilemma; pro-sociality; donations; public good game; team incentives; laboratory experiment; charitable giving; anonymity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C C7 C70 C71 C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/12/2/32/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/12/2/32/ (text/html)

Related works:
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:gam:jgames:v:12:y:2021:i:2:p:32-:d:533006

Access Statistics for this article

Games is currently edited by Ms. Susie Huang

More articles in Games from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().