Cooperation under risk and ambiguity

Lisa Björk (), Martin Kocher, Peter Martinsson and Pham Nam Khanh
Additional contact information
Lisa Björk: Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University, Postal: P.O. Box 640, SE 40530 GÖTEBORG, Sweden, http://www.economics.gu.se
Pham Nam Khanh: School of Economics, Ho Chi Minh City University of Economics, Postal: Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam

No 683, Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics

Abstract: The return from investments in public goods is almost always uncertain, in contrast to the most common setup in the existing empirical literature. We study the impact of natural uncertainty on cooperation in a social dilemma by conducting a public goods experiment in the laboratory in which the marginal return to contributions is either deterministic, risky (known probabilities) or ambiguous (unknown probabilities). Our design allows us to make inferences on dierences in cooperative attitudes, beliefs, and one-shot as well as repeated contributions to the public good under the three regimes. Interestingly, we do not find that natural uncertainty has a significant impact on the inclination to cooperate, neither on the beliefs of others nor on actual contribution decisions. Our results support the generalizability of previous experimental results based on deterministic settings. From a behavioural point of view, it appears that strategic uncertainty overshadows natural uncertainty in social dilemmas.

Keywords: Public good; conditional cooperation; experiment; uncertainty; risk; ambiguity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D64 D81 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2016-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-res and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/2077/50814 (text/html)

Related works:
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:hhs:gunwpe:0683

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Box 640, SE 405 30 GÖTEBORG, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jessica Oscarsson ().