 Nudging cooperation in public goods provisionKai Barron and Tuomas Nurminen Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2020, vol. 88, issue C Abstract: This paper experimentally studies two simple interventions that an authority figure might employ to promote cooperation in a public goods game when accurate feedback about contributions is not available. The first intervention aims to nudge participants to higher contribution levels by labeling contributions above a particular threshold as being “good”. Such a “norm-nudge” is intended to provide subjects with a clear, valenced focal point upon which they can coordinate. The second intervention aims to exploit lying aversion to induce higher contributions by requiring subjects to announce how much they contributed. We find that the nudge leads to a striking increase in the cooperation rate. By contrast, the ex post announcement mechanism does not have a significant effect on the cooperation rate. We present suggestive evidence that the nudge we use provides subjects with a focal point, helping conditional cooperators to coordinate their contributions. Keywords: Cooperation; Nudge; Focal point; Public good; Lying; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceco:v:88:y:2020:i:c:s2214804319302563 DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2020.101542 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier |
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