Providing Global Public Goods: Electoral Delegation And Cooperation

Martin Kocher, Fangfang Tan and Jing Yu

Munich Reprints in Economics from University of Munich, Department of Economics

Abstract: This study experimentally examines the effect of electoral delegation on providing global public goods shared by several groups. Each group elects one delegate who can freely decide on each group member's contribution to the global public goods. Our results show that people mostly vote for delegates who assign equal contributions for every group member. However, in contrast to standard theoretical predictions for our delegation mechanism, unequal contributions across groups drive cooperation down over time, and it decreases efficiency by almost 50% compared to the selfish benchmark. This pattern is not driven by delegates trying to exploit their fellow group members, as indicated by theory. It is driven by conditional cooperation of delegates across groups. Since one of the potential sources of the resulting inefficiency is the polycentric nature of global public goods provision together with other-regarding preferences, we use the term P-inefficiency to describe our finding.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Published in Economic Inquiry 1 56(2018): pp. 381-397

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: PROVIDING GLOBAL PUBLIC GOODS: ELECTORAL DELEGATION AND COOPERATION (2018)
Working Paper: Providing global public goods: Electoral delegation and cooperation (2014)
Working Paper: Providing global public goods: Electoral delegation and cooperation (2014)
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:lmu:muenar:62833

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Munich Reprints in Economics from University of Munich, Department of Economics Ludwigstr. 28, 80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tamilla Benkelberg ().