Providing global public goods: Electoral delegation and cooperation

Martin Kocher, Fangfang Tan and Jing Yu

Working Papers from Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance

Abstract: This paper experimentally examines the effect of electoral delegation on providing global public goods shared by several groups. Each group elects a delegate who can freely decide on each group member’s contribution to the global public good. Our results show that people mostly vote for delegates who assign equal contributions for every group member. However, in contrast to standard theoretical predictions, unequal contributions across groups drive cooperation down over time, and it decreases efficiency by almost 50% compared to the selfish benchmark. This pattern is not driven by delegates trying to exploit their fellow group members, as indicated by theory – quite to the opposite, other-regarding preferences and a re-election incentives guarantee that delegates assign equal contributions for all group members. It is driven by conditional cooperation of delegates across groups. Since the source of the resulting inefficiency is the polycentric nature of global public goods provision together with other-regarding preferences, we use the term P-inefficiency to describe our finding.

Keywords: Global Public Goods; Delegation; Cooperation; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D72 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2014-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-pol and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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http://www.tax.mpg.de/RePEc/mpi/wpaper/TAX-MPG-RPS-2014-12_2.pdf Full text (original version) (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: PROVIDING GLOBAL PUBLIC GOODS: ELECTORAL DELEGATION AND COOPERATION (2018)
Working Paper: Providing Global Public Goods: Electoral Delegation And Cooperation (2018)
Working Paper: Providing global public goods: Electoral delegation and cooperation (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mpi:wpaper:tax-mpg-rps-2014-12_2

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