When Identifying Contributors is Costly: An Experiment on Public Goods

Anya Samek and Roman Sheremeta

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Studies show that identifying contributors increases contributions to public goods. In practice, viewing identifiable information is costly, which may discourage people from accessing it. We design a public goods experiment in which participants can pay to view information about identities and contributions of group members. We compare this to a treatment in which there is no identifiable information, and a treatment in which all contributors are identified. Our main findings are that: (1) contributions in the treatment with costly information are as high as those in the treatment with free information, (2) participants rarely choose to view the information, and (3) being a high contributor is correlated with choosing to view information about others.

Keywords: public-goods; information; recognition; laboratory experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-02-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-pub
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Related works:
Journal Article: When Identifying Contributors is Costly: An Experiment on Public Goods (2016)
Working Paper: When Identifying Contributors is Costly: An Experiment on Public Goods (2014)
Working Paper: When Identifying Contributors is Costly: An Experiment on Public Goods (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:61903

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