Search results for "Public goods game"
showing 10 items of 10 documents
Inducing efficient conditional cooperation patterns in public goods games, an experimental investigation
2010
This study analyses the behavior in a repeated public goods game when subjects know about the possibility of existence of strict conditional cooperators. We employed a baseline treatment and a threat treatment in which subjects are informed about the possibility of being in a group together with automata playing a grim trigger strategy. We conjecture the resulting game allows for almost fully efficient outcomes. Contributions in the threat treatment increase by 40% before a surprise restart, and by 50% after the surprise restart. In line with the grim trigger strategy subjects contribute either all or nothing in the threat treatment.
Shame in decision making under risk conditions: Understanding the effect of transparency.
2017
The role played by the emotion of shame in the area of decision-making in situations of risk has hardly been studied. In this article, we show how the socio-moral emotions and the anticipated feeling of shame associated with different options can determine our decisions, even overriding the cognitive choice tendency proposed by the certainty effect. To do so, we carried out an experiment with university students as participants, dividing them into four experimental conditions. Our findings suggest that people avoid making unethical decisions, both when these decisions are made public to others and when they remain in the private sphere. This result seems to indicate that the main factor in …
Do Children Cooperate Conditionally? Adapting the Strategy Method for First-Graders
2018
We develop a public goods game (PGG) to measure cooperation and conditional cooperation in young children. Our design addresses several obstacles in adapting simultaneous and sequential PGGs to children who are not yet able to read or write, do not possess advanced abilities to calculate payoffs, and only have a very limited attention span at their disposal. It features the combination of haptic offline explanation, fully standardized audiovisual instructions, computerized choices based on touch-screens, and a suitable incentive scheme. Applying our experimental protocol to a sample of German first-graders, we find that already 6-year-olds cooperate conditionally and that the relative frequ…
Assortment, but not knowledge of assortment, affects cooperation and individual success in human groups
2017
The success or failure of human collective action often depends on the cooperation tendencies of individuals in groups, and on the information that individuals have about each other's cooperativeness. However, it is unclear whether these two factors have an interactive effect on cooperation dynamics. Using a decision-making experiment, we confirm that groups comprising individuals with higher cooperation tendencies cooperate at a higher level than groups comprising individuals with low cooperation tendencies. Moreover, assorting individuals with similar cooperation tendency together affected behaviour so that the most cooperative individuals tended to cooperate more and the least cooperativ…
Asset Markets and Equilibrium Selection in Public Goods Games with Provision Points: An Experimental Study
2001
This paper reports the experimental results of implicit pre-play communication on the equilibrium selection in threshold public goods game experiments. The existence of an asset market in which the right to participate in a public goods game with a provision point is auctioned off among a larger group in a first stage is found to enhance significantly the contribution to the provision of the public good in a subsequent second stage. Though, contributions declined on average in the repeated public goods game when subjects were endowed with the right to play, they increased when subjects purchased the right to play. Once reached the Pareto-dominant equilibrium in the second stage, the auction…
Large scale and information effects on cooperation in public good games
2019
AbstractThe problem of public good provision is central in economics and touches upon many challenging societal issues, ranging from climate change mitigation to vaccination schemes. However, results which are supposed to be applied to a societal scale have only been obtained with small groups of people, with a maximum group size of 100 being reported in the literature. This work takes this research to a new level by carrying out and analysing experiments on public good games with up to 1000 simultaneous players. The experiments are carried out via an online protocol involving daily decisions for extended periods. Our results show that within those limits, participants’ behaviour and collec…
ASSET MARKETS AND EQUILIBRIUM SELECTION IN PUBLIC GOODS GAMES WITH PROVISION POINTS: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY
2001
We report experimental results on the effects that auctioning the right to play a public goods game with a provision point may have on equilibrium selection and individual behavior. Auctioning off such a right among a larger population of players strikingly enhances public good provision. Once public good provision is obtained, the auction price at the preliminary stage increases to its upper limit, dissipating all players’ gains associated with the provision of the public good. Individual deviations from the equilibrium strategy are neither able to force lower market prices nor to affect provision of the public good in subsequent periods. (JEL C72, C92, H41) I. INTRODUCTION Public good pro…
Do Children Cooperate Conditionally?:Adapting the Strategy Method for First-Graders
2020
We develop a public goods game (PGG) to measure cooperation and conditional cooperation in young children. Our design addresses several obstacles in adapting simultaneous and sequential PGGs to children who are not yet able to read or write, do not possess advanced abilities to calculate payoffs, and only have a very limited attention span. It features the combination of haptic offline explanation, fully standardized audiovisual instructions, computerized choices based on touchscreens, and a suitable incentive scheme. Applying our experimental protocol to 129 German first-graders, we find that already 6-year-olds cooperate conditionally and that the relative frequency of different cooperati…
Pool punishment in public goods games: How do sanctioners’ incentives affect us?
2021
Abstract Centralized sanctioning in social dilemmas has been shown to increase efficiency with respect to standard decentralized peer punishment. In this context, we explore the impact of sanctioners’ motivations through their payoff scheme, not only on their actions but also on the actions of the monitored individuals. To do so, we compare the implementation of two different payoff schemes for the monitor in a centralized sanctioning framework: (i) a fixed payoff scheme and (ii) a variable payoff scheme contingent on the level of cooperation achieved. We find that providing the sanctioner with a contingent payoff has a negative impact on contributions. This occurs although sanctioners impl…
Human cooperation in groups: variation begets variation
2015
Open Access Published: 04 November 2015 Human cooperation in groups: variation begets variation Pieter van den Berg, Lucas Molleman, Jaakko Junikka, Mikael Puurtinen & Franz J. Weissing Scientific Reports volume 5, Article number: 16144 (2015) Cite this article 383 Accesses 4 Citations 6 Altmetric Metricsdetails Abstract Many experiments on human cooperation have revealed that individuals differ systematically in their tendency to cooperate with others. It has also been shown that individuals condition their behaviour on the overall cooperation level of their peers. Yet, little is known about how individuals respond to heterogeneity in cooperativeness in their neighbourhood. Here, we presen…