Heterogeneous Social Preferences and the Dynamics of Free Riding in Public Goods

Urs Fischbacher and Simon Gächter

No 2011, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We provide a direct test of the role of social preferences in voluntary cooperation. We elicit individuals' cooperation preference in one experiment and make a point prediction about the contribution to a repeated public good. This allows for a novel test as to whether there are "types" of players who behave consistently with their elicited preferences. We find clear-cut evidence for the existence of "types". People who express free rider preferences show the most systematic deviation from the predicted contributions, because they contribute in the first half of the experiment. We also show that the interaction of heterogeneous types explains a large part of the dynamics of free riding.

Keywords: experiments; public goods games; conditional cooperation; voluntary contributions; free riding (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 D64 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2006-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-pbe, nep-pol and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (67)

Published - substantially revised and split up versions published as: (1) 'Social Preferences, Beliefs, and the Dynamics of Free Riding in Public Goods' in: American Economic Review, 2010, 100 (1), 541-556; and (2) 'The Behavioral Validity of the Strategy Method in Public Goods Experiments', Journal of Economic Psychology, 2012, 33 (4), 897-913

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Working Paper: Heterogeneous social preferences and the dynamics of free riding in public goods (2006)
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