Experimental investigations of binary threshold public good games

Jörg Spiller and Friedel Bolle

No 393, Discussion Papers from European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Department of Business Administration and Economics

Abstract: In Binary Threshold Public Good (BTPG) games n players contribute or not to the production of a public good which is produced if and only if there are at least k contributors. The BTPG games with the highest (k=n) and the lowest (k=1) threshold are the Stag Hunt game and the Volunteer's Dilemma. There is a plethora of equilibria in BTPG games. We experimentally investigate 16 different symmetric and asymmetric BTPG games with n=4 and k=1,2,3,4 and test general theoretical attributes of equilibria and whether equilibrium play can apply at all. As theory predicts, neither magnitude effects nor a negative instead of a positive frame affect behavior which is contrary to the bulk of the experimental literature. In the Stag Hunt game, which is often used to discriminate between payoff dominance and risk dominance, risk dominance as a description of behavior is clearly rejected and payoff dominance is moderately supported. We show that no theory with homogeneous players can describe behavior.

Keywords: Binary Threshold Public Goods; framing; equilibrium selection; payoff dominance; risk dominance; efficiency; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D72 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:euvwdp:393

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