Elite Status, Market Linkages, and Contributions to Collective Goods: Evidence from a Survey and Public Goods Experiments

Can the threat of being shamed or the prospect of being honoured lead to greater cooperation? We test this hypothesis with anonymous six-player public goods experiments, an experimental paradigm used to investigate problems related to overusing common resources. We instructed the players that the two individuals who were least generous after 10 rounds would be exposed to the group. As the natural antithesis, we also test the effects of honour by revealing the identities of the two players who were most generous. The non-monetary, reputational effects induced by shame and honour each led to approximately 50 per cent higher donations to the public good when compared with the control, demonstrating that both shame and honour can drive cooperation and can help alleviate the tragedy of the commons.

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Cooperation and noise in public goods experiments: applying the contribution function approach

Journal of Public Economics ◽

10.1016/s0047-2727(99)00120-6 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 79 (2) ◽

pp. 399-427 ◽

Cited By ~ 142

Author(s):

Jordi Brandts ◽

Arthur Schram

Keyword(s):

Public Goods ◽

Function Approach ◽

Public Goods Experiments

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Estimation of Treatment Effects in Repeated Public Goods Experiments

Econometrics ◽

10.3390/econometrics6040043 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 6 (4) ◽

pp. 43

Author(s):

Jianning Kong ◽

Donggyu Sul

Keyword(s):

Public Goods ◽

Treatment Effects ◽

Time Varying ◽

Initial Condition ◽

Finite Sample ◽

Cross Sectional ◽

Public Goods Experiments ◽

Voluntary Contribution Mechanism ◽

Average Contribution ◽

Cross Sectional Average

This paper provides a new statistical model for repeated voluntary contribution mechanism games. In a repeated public goods experiment, contributions in the first round are cross-sectionally independent simply because subjects are randomly selected. Meanwhile, contributions to a public account over rounds are serially and cross-sectionally correlated. Furthermore, the cross-sectional average of the contributions across subjects usually decreases over rounds. By considering this non-stationary initial condition—the initial contribution has a different distribution from the rest of the contributions—we model statistically the time varying patterns of the average contribution in repeated public goods experiments and then propose a simple but efficient method to test for treatment effects. The suggested method has good finite sample performance and works well in practice.

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