Disposition, history and contributions in public goods experiments

Novel voluntary contribution mechanism experiments are used to investigate how individuals’ experience (history) and cooperative disposition and interact. We find that a subject's initial public contribution is a useful measure of cooperative disposition. History effects are isolated by compari...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of economic behavior & organization Vol. 62; no. 2; pp. 304 - 315
Main Authors Gunnthorsdottir, Anna, Houser, Daniel, McCabe, Kevin
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.02.2007
Elsevier
Elsevier Sequoia S.A
SeriesJournal of Economic Behavior & Organization
Subjects
Conditional cooperation
Contributions
Cooperation
Economic behaviour
Experimental economics
Microeconomics
Public good
Public goods
Reciprocity
Sorting
Studies
Trust
Voluntary contribution mechanism
Conditional cooperation
Reciprocity
Voluntary contribution mechanism
Public goods
C92
Trust
C72
Sorting
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Summary:Novel voluntary contribution mechanism experiments are used to investigate how individuals’ experience (history) and cooperative disposition and interact. We find that a subject's initial public contribution is a useful measure of cooperative disposition. History effects are isolated by comparing treatments with random group assignment to treatments where subjects are grouped based on their contributions. The latter treatment increases the frequency with which cooperative subjects interact. We trace the familiar decay in public good contributions over rounds, which are observed under random grouping, to reductions in contributions by those with cooperative dispositions when they are forced to repeatedly interact with free-riders.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-2
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
content type line 23
ISSN:0167-2681
1879-1751
DOI:10.1016/j.jebo.2005.03.008