Tipping Versus Cooperating to Supply a Public Good

Scott Barrett and Astrid Dannenberg

Journal of the European Economic Association, 2017, vol. 15, issue 4, 910-941

Abstract: In some important multiplayer situations, such as efforts to supply a global public good, players can choose the game they want to play. In this paper we conduct an experimental test of the decision by a group with fixed membership, playing over a finite number of periods, to choose between a “tipping” game, in which every player wants to contribute to the public good provided enough other players contribute, and a prisoners’ dilemma, the classic cooperation game. In the prisoners’ dilemma, the first best outcome is attainable, but cannot be sustained as a Nash equilibrium. In the tipping game, only a second best outcome may be attainable, but there exists a Nash equilibrium that is strictly preferred to the one in the prisoners’ dilemma. We show that many groups persistently choose the prisoners’ dilemma despite its strategic disadvantage, and that the groups that eventually choose the tipping game do better than the ones that stick with the prisoners’ dilemma.

JEL-codes: C72 C92 F53 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jeea/jvw022 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Tipping versus Cooperating to Supply a Public Good (2015)
Working Paper: Tipping versus Cooperating to Supply a Public Good (2015)
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jeurec:v:15:y:2017:i:4:p:910-941.

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the European Economic Association is currently edited by Romain Wacziarg

More articles in Journal of the European Economic Association from European Economic Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().