Tipping versus Cooperating to Supply a Public Good

Scott Barrett and Astrid Dannenberg
Additional contact information
Scott Barrett: Columbia University

MAGKS Papers on Economics from Philipps-Universität Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung)

Abstract: In some important multi-player situations, such as efforts to supply a global public good, players can choose the game they want to play. In this paper we conduct an experimental test of the decision to choose between a “tipping” game, in which every player wants to contribute to the public good provided enough other players contribute, and a prisoners’ dilemma, the classic cooperation game. In the prisoners’ dilemma, the first best outcome is attainable, but cannot be sustained as a Nash equilibrium. In the tipping game, only a second best outcome may be attainable, but there exists a Nash equilibrium that is strictly preferred to the one in the prisoners’ dilemma. We show that groups do significantly better when they choose the tipping game, and yet many groups repeatedly choose the prisoners’ dilemma, indicating a mistaken and persistent tendency to prefer a game with potentially higher payoffs to one having a strategic advantage.

JEL-codes: C72 C92 F53 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-gth, nep-hpe and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Forthcoming in

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.uni-marburg.de/fb02/makro/forschung/mag ... /29-2015_barrett.pdf First 201529 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Tipping Versus Cooperating to Supply a Public Good (2017)
Working Paper: Tipping versus Cooperating to Supply a Public Good (2015)
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:mar:magkse:201529

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MAGKS Papers on Economics from Philipps-Universität Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bernd Hayo ().