Democracy and compliance in public goods games

Carlo Gallier

No 17-038, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: I investigate if, how, and why the effect of a contribution rule in a public goods game depends on how it is implemented: endogenously chosen or externally imposed. The rule prescribes full contributions to the public good backed by a nondeterrent sanction for those who do not comply. My experimental design allows me to disentangle to what extent the effect of the contribution rule under democracy is driven by self-selection of treatments, information transmitted via the outcome of the referendum, and democracy per se. In case treatments are endogenously chosen via a democratic decision-making process, the contribution rule significantly increases contributions to the public good. However, democratic participation does not affect participants' contribution behavior directly, after controlling for self-selection of treatments and the information transmitted by voting.

Keywords: laboratory experiment; public good; democracy; endogenous institutions; voting; contribution rule; compliance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D02 D72 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-cta, nep-des, nep-exp, nep-law and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/170492/1/1000791904.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:zewdip:17038

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().