Delegation and public pressure in a threshold public goods game

Doruk İriş (dorukiris@sogang.ac.kr), J. Lee and Alessandro Tavoni (alessandro.tavoni@unibo.it)

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Many public goods cannot be provided directly by interested parties (e.g. citizens), as they entail decision-making at nested hierarchical scales: at a lower level individuals elect a representative, while at a higher scale elected delegates decide on the provision level, with some degree of scrutiny from their constituency. Furthermore, many such decisions involve uncertainty about the magnitude of the contribution that is needed for the good to be provided (or bad to be avoided). In such circumstances delegates can serve as important vehicles for coordination by aggregating societal preferences for provision. Yet, the role of delegation in threshold public goods games is understudied. We contrast the behavior of delegates to that of self-representing individuals in the avoidance of a public bad in an experimental setting. We randomly assign twelve subjects into four teams and ask each team to elect a delegate via majority voting. The elected delegates play several variants of a one-shot public goods game in which losses can ensue if the sum of their contributions falls short of a threshold. We find that when delegation is coupled with a mild form of public pressure, it has a significantly negative effect on contributions, even though the non-delegates can only signal their preferred levels of public good contributions. The reason is that delegates give more weight to the least cooperative suggestion: they focus on the lower of the two public good contributions recommended by their teammates.

Keywords: delegation; cooperation; threshold public goods game; climate experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C92 D81 H40 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2019-11-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published in Environmental and Resource Economics, 1, November, 2019, 74(3), pp. 1331 - 1353. ISSN: 0924-6460

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Related works:
Journal Article: Delegation and Public Pressure in a Threshold Public Goods Game (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:102313

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