Privately Contributing to Public Goods over Time - An Experimental Study -

Werner Güth (), Maria Vittoria Levati () and Andreas Stiehler ()

Papers on Strategic Interaction from Max Planck Institute of Economics, Strategic Interaction Group

Abstract: Similar to Levati and Neugebauer (2001), a clock is used by which participants can vary their individual contributions for voluntarily providing a public good. As time goes by, participants either in(de)crease their contribution gradually or keep it constant. Groups of two poorly and two richly endowed participants encounter repeatedly the weakest link-, the usual average contribution- and the best shot-technology of public good provision in a within subject-design. Some striking findings are that the weakest link-technology fares much better than the other two technologies in terms of welfare, and that the willingness of people to voluntarily contribute is greatly a®ected by the (increasing or decreasing) clock mechanism.

Keywords: Public goods; Voluntary contributions; Efficient provision; Clock mechanism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C92 H41 D44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-pbe and nep-pub
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://papers.mpiew-jena.mpg.de/esi/discussionpapers/2002-01.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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:esi:discus:2002-01

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.econ.mpg. ... arch/ESI/discuss.php

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers on Strategic Interaction from Max Planck Institute of Economics, Strategic Interaction Group
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Karin Richter ().