A Breakdown of Cooperation in Public Goods Games

Tanzir Rahman Khan and Bradley Ruffle

Department of Economics Working Papers from McMaster University

Abstract: We introduce a new variant of the Public Goods Game (PGG), building on and com bining the frameworks of Fischbacher et al. (2001) and Cheung (2014). We demonstrate that the widely used player categorizations based on players’ responses to others’ average contribution– such as conditional cooperators, free-riders, and hump-shaped cooperators– fail to fully capture players’ conditioning tendencies. Specifically, players are sensitive to the different distributions of contributions that can arise from a given mean, which leads to a re-categorization of players based on distributions compared to their categorization based solely on averages. Furthermore, we elicit beliefs about the most likely distribution of contributions underlying each mean. We find that providing incentives for correct guesses does not improve accuracy. Moreover, cooperators and free-riders hold widely divergent distributional beliefs.

Keywords: experimental economics; public goods game; conditional cooperation; belief elicitation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2024-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-gth
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mcm:deptwp:2024-12

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