Does Uncertainty Deter Provision of Public Goods?

Béatrice Boulu-Reshef, Samuel H. Brott () and Adam Zylbersztejn ()
Additional contact information
Samuel H. Brott: Berkeley Research Group, LLC, Washington

Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne

Abstract: We study a finitely repeated public goods game (based on the voluntary contribution mechanism) played under complete uncertainty about the marginal benefit of the public good relative to the private consumption (commonly known as the marginal per capita return: neither one's marginal per capita return nor other players' marginal per capita returns are known at the time of decision-making. We show that contributions are equivalent when the rate of return is predetermined and when it is uncertain, and display a similar decay over time. Combined with the previous experimental findings, our results suggest that the cooperation in public goods games is sensitive to the source of uncertainty about marginal per capita return

Keywords: Cooperation; uncertainty; voluntary contribution mechanism; public good; expected return (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 C92 D81 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2017-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-gth, nep-pbe and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://mse.univ-paris1.fr/pub/mse/CES2017/17004.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Does Uncertainty Deter Provision of Public Goods? (2017)
Working Paper: Does Uncertainty Deter Provision of Public Goods? (2017)
Working Paper: Does Uncertainty Deter Provision of Public Goods? (2017)
Working Paper: Does Uncertainty Deter Provision of Public Goods? (2017)
Working Paper: Does Uncertainty Deter Provision of Public Goods? (2017)
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:mse:cesdoc:17004

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucie Label ().