AN EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF CONDITIONAL COOPERATION

Rachel Croson, Enrique Fatas () and Tibor Neugebauer

Working Papers. Serie AD from Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, S.A. (Ivie)

Abstract: Experimental and empirical evidence identifies the existence of socialpreferences and proposes competing models of such preferences. In this paper, wefurther examine one such social preference: conditional cooperation. We run threeexperimental public goods games, the traditional voluntary contribution mechanism(VCM, also called the linear public goods game), the weak-link mechanism (WLM) andthe best-shot mechanism (BSM). We then analyze the existence and types ofconditional cooperation observed. We find that participants are responsive to the pastcontributions of others in all three games, but are most responsive to differentcontributions in each game: the median in the VCM, the minimum in the WLM and themaximum in the BSM. We conclude by discussing implications of these differences forbehavior in these three mechanisms. This paper thus refines our notions of conditionalcooperation to allow for different types of public good production functions and byextension, other contexts.

Keywords: experimental economics; conditional cooperation; public goods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C92 D44 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2006-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-pbe and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ivi:wpasad:2006-24

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