Voluntary Participation and Spite in Public Good Provision Experiments: An International Comparison

Timothy Cason, Tatsuyoshi Saijo () and Takehiko Yamato ()

Experimental Economics, 2002, vol. 5, issue 2, 133-153

Abstract: This paper studies voluntary public good provision in the laboratory, in a cross-cultural experiment conducted in the United States and Japan. Our environment differs from the standard voluntary contribution mechanism because subjects first decide whether or not to participate in providing this non-excludable public good. This participation decision is conveyed to the other subject prior to the subjects' contribution decisions. We find that only the American data are consistent with the evolutionary-stable-strategy Nash equilibrium predictions, and that behavior is significantly different across countries. Japanese subjects are more likely to act spitefully in the early periods of the experiment, even though our design changes subject pairings each period so that no two subjects ever interact twice. Surprisingly, this spiteful behavior eventually leads to more efficient public good contributions for Japanese subjects than for American subjects. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2002

Keywords: fairness; other regarding preferences; subject pools; culture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (80)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Voluntary Participation and Spite in Public Good Provision Experiments: an International Comparison (2000)
Working Paper: Voluntary Participation and Spite in Public Good Provision Experiments: an International Comparison (1998)
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DOI: 10.1023/A:1020317321607

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