Dynamic Voluntary Contribution to a Public Good: Learning to be a Free Rider

Christiane Clemens and Thomas Riechmann

Hannover Economic Papers (HEP) from Leibniz Universität Hannover, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät

Abstract: This paper explores the question whether boundedly rational agents learn to behave optimally when asked to voluntarily contribute to a public good. The decision process of individuals is described by an Evolutionary Algorithm. We analyze the learning process of purely and impurely altruistic agents and find that in both cases the contribution level converges towards the Nash equilibrium although, with pure altruism, exact free rider-behavior is never observed. The latter result corresponds to findings from experiments on voluntary contribution to a public good. Crucial determinants of the learning process are the population size and the propensity to experiment.

Keywords: bounded rationality; evolutionary games; experiments; learning; public goods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C6 C73 D83 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2001-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://diskussionspapiere.wiwi.uni-hannover.de/pdf_bib/dp-240.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Dynamic Voluntary Contribution to a Public Good:Learning to be a Free Rider (2001)
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:han:dpaper:dp-240

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Hannover Economic Papers (HEP) from Leibniz Universität Hannover, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Heidrich, Christian ().