Volunteering a Public Service: An Experimental Investigation

Marc Bilodeau (), J. Childs and Stuart Mestelman ()

Department of Economics Working Papers from McMaster University

Abstract: In some public goods environments it may be advantageous for heterogeneous groups to be coordinated by a single individual. This “volunteer” will bear private costs for acting as the leader while enabling each member of the group to achieve maximum potential gains. This environment is modeled as a War of Attrition game in which everyone can wait for someone else to volunteer. Since these games generally have multiple Nash equilibria but a unique subgameperfect equilibrium, we tested experimentally the predictive power of the subgame-perfection criterion. Our data contradict that subjects saw the subgame-perfect strategy combination as the obvious way to play the game. An alternative behavioral hypothesis – that subjects were unable to predict accurately how their opponents would play and tried to maximize their expected payoff – is proposed. This hypothesis fits the observed data generally well.

JEL-codes: H41 C72 C91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-exp
Date: 2001-05
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/mceel/papers/bcmvps-sep03.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Volunteering a public service: an experimental investigation (2004)
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:mcm:deptwp:2001-05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics Working Papers from McMaster University
Series data maintained by ().