Heterogeneous reactions to heterogeneity in returns from public goods

Urs Fischbacher, Simeon Schudy and Sabrina Teyssier ()

Social Choice and Welfare, 2014, vol. 43, issue 1, 195-217

Abstract: In many cases individuals benefit differently from the provision of a public good. We study in a laboratory experiment how heterogeneity in returns and uncertainty about the own return affects unconditional and conditional contribution behavior in a linear public goods game. The elicitation of conditional contributions in combination with a within subject design allows us to investigate belief-independent and type-specific reactions to heterogeneity. We find that, on average, heterogeneity in returns decreases unconditional contributions but affects contributions only weakly. Uncertainty in addition to heterogeneity reduces conditional contributions slightly. Individual reactions to heterogeneity differ systematically. Selfish subjects and one third of conditional cooperators do not react to heterogeneity whereas the reactions of the remaining conditional cooperators vary. A substantial part of heterogeneity in reactions can be explained by inequity aversion with respect to different reference groups. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (66)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00355-013-0763-x (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Heterogeneous reactions to heterogeneity in returns from public goods (2014)
Working Paper: Heterogeneous reactions to heterogeneity in returns from public goods (2013)
Working Paper: Heterogeneous Reactions to Heterogeneity in Returns from Public Goods (2012)
Working Paper: Heterogeneous Reactions to Heterogeneity in Returns from Public Goods (2012)
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:spr:sochwe:v:43:y:2014:i:1:p:195-217

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-013-0763-x

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().