Preferences and strategic behavior in public goods games

Conditional cooperation; Free riding; Public goods; Strategic sophistication; Voluntary contribution; Economics and Econometrics; Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

Abstract :

[en] In finitely repeated public goods games, contributions are initially high, and gradually decrease over time. Two main explanations are consistent with this pattern: (i) the population is composed of free-riders, who never contribute, and conditional cooperators, who contribute if others do so as well; (ii) strategic players contribute to sustain mutually beneficial future cooperation, but reduce their contributions as the end of the game approaches. This paper analyzes experimentally these explanations, by manipulating group composition to form homogeneous groups on both the preference and the strategic ability dimensions. Our results highlight the role of strategic ability in sustaining contributions, and suggest that the interaction between the two dimensions also matters: we find that groups that sustain high levels of cooperation are composed of members who share a common inclination toward cooperation and also have the strategic abilities to recognize and reap the benefits of enduring cooperation.

Disciplines :

Economic systems & public economics

Author, co-author :

Grandjean, Gilles ; CEREC, Université Saint-Louis - Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

Lefebvre, Mathieu ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Ecole de Gestion de l'Université de Liège ; Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, AMSE, Marseille, France

Mantovani, Marco ; Department of Economics, University of Milan Bicocca, Milan, Italy

Language :

English

Title :

Preferences and strategic behavior in public goods games

Publication date :

March 2022

Journal title :

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

ISSN :

0167-2681

eISSN :

1879-1751

Publisher :

Elsevier B.V.

Volume :

195

Pages :

171 - 185

Peer reviewed :

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

Additional URL :

https://api.elsevier.com/content/article/PII:S0167268122000130?httpAccept=text/xml

Funding text :

The authors are grateful to the associate editor and two anonymous referees for their very helpful comments and suggestions. The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support by the project ”IDex Attractivité” funded through the University of Strasbourg IDEX Unistra, by the project ”PRIN 2017K8ANN4” funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, by the French National Research Agency Grant ANR-17-EURE-0020, and by the Excellence Initiative of Aix-Marseille University - A*MIDEX.

Available on ORBi :

since 06 May 2022

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