Impact of altruistic behavior on group cooperation: A mechanism working in the presence of an altruist may solve the public goods provision problem

Hiroki Ozono, Yoshio Kamijo and Kazumi Shimizu
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Hiroki Ozono: Faculty of Law, Economics and Humanities, Kagoshima University

No 1408, Working Papers from Waseda University, Faculty of Political Science and Economics

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new mechanism to achieve cooperation in public goods provision. The mechanism is named GEM, which stands for gradualism, endogeneity, and modification, its important properties. In a public goods game with GEM, spread over 20 periods, a target contribution is presented to the players in each period. The target is gradually increased when all members reach it. If players contribute less than the target in a certain period, the minimum contribution will be treated as the next period's target. In the experiment, the GEM mechanism achieved a high level of cooperation when the participants' contributions were restricted to the target. However, when participants were allowed to contribute more than the target, cooperation was not achieved because of the presence of“excessive altruists”—participants who contributed more than the target.This is because excessive cooperation facilitated free riding by other members. Finally,we discuss the limitation and possibilities of the GEM mechanism.

Keywords: cooperation; public goods game; altruist; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 C92 M54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2014-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-net
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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