Heterogeneous social preferences and the dynamics of free riding in public goods

Urs Fischbacher and Simon Gaechter ()
Additional contact information
Simon Gaechter: School of Economics, University of Nottingham
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Simon Gächter ()

No 2006-01, Discussion Papers from The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham

Abstract: We provide a direct test of the role of social preferences in voluntary cooperation. We elicit individuals’ cooperation preference in one experiment and make a point prediction about the contribution to a repeated public good. This allows for a novel test as to whether there are "types" of players who behave consistently with their elicited preferences. We find clear-cut evidence for the existence of "types". People who express free rider preferences show the most systematic deviation from the predicted contributions, because they contribute in the first half of the experiment. We also show that the interaction of heterogeneous types explains a large part of the dynamics of free riding.

Keywords: Public goods games; experiments; voluntary contributions; conditional cooperation; free riding (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 C72 H41 D64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-pbe and nep-soc
Date: 2006-01
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/economics/cedex/papers/2006-01.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Heterogeneous Social Preferences and the Dynamics of Free Riding in Public Goods (2006)
Working Paper: Heterogeneous social preferences and the dynamics of free riding in public goods (2005)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdx:dpaper:2006-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Alex Possajennikov ().