Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

The effect of introducing costly partner selection for the voluntary contribution to a public good is examined. Participants are in six sequences of five rounds of a two-person public good game in partner design. At the end of each sequence, they can select a new partner out of six group members. Unidirectional and bidirectional partner selection mechanisms are introduced and compared to controls with random partner rematching. Results demonstrate significantly higher cooperation in correspondence to unidirectional partner selection than to bidirectional selection and random rematching. Average monetary effort for being able to choose a partner is substantially high and remains stable.

Keywords

public goods partner selection experimental economics

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Andreoni, J. 1988. Why free-ride: Strategies and learning in public goods experiments. Journal of Public Economics 37: 291-304.

Andreoni, J. , and R. Croson . Forthcoming. Partners versus strangers: The effect of random rematching in public goods experiments. In Handbook of Experimental Economics Results, edited by V. Smith and C. Plott . New York: Elsevier.

Croson, R. 1996. Partners and strangers revisited. Economics Letters 53: 25-32.

Ehrhart, K. , and C. Keser . 1999. Mobility and cooperation: On the run. CIRANO Working Paper 99s-24. Center for Interuniversity Research and Analysis on Organizations (CIRANO), Montreal, Canada.

Fehr, E. , and S. Gächter . 2000. Fairness, and retaliation: The economics of reciprocity. Journal of Economic Perspectives 14: 159-181.

Fischbacher, U. 1999. z-tree: Zurich toolbox for readymade economic experiments. Experimenter’s manual. Working Paper No. 21, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, University of Zurich.

Glomm, G. , and R. Lagunoff . 1998. A Tiebout theory of public vs. private provision of collective goods. Journal of Public Economics 68: 91-112.

Gunnthorsdottir, A. , D. Houser , K. McCabe , and H. Ameden .2001.Disposition, history and contributions in public goods experiments. Working Paper 99-02, University of Arizona, Tuscon.

Hauk, E. , and R. Nagel . 2001. Choice of partners in multiple two-person prisoner’s dilemma games: An experimental study. Journal of Conflict Resolution 45: 770-793.

10.

Hayashi, N. , and T. Yamagishi . 1998. Selective play: Choosing partners in an uncertain world. Personality and Social Psychology Review 2: 276-289.

11.

Isaac, M. R. , and J. Walker . 1988. Group size effects in public goods provision: The voluntary contributions mechanism. Quarterly Journal of Economics 103: 179-199.

12.

Ledyard, J. O. 1995. Public goods: A survey of experimental research. In Handbook of experimental economics, edited by J. H. Kagel and A. Roth . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

13.

Musgrave, R. A. 1939. The voluntary exchange theory of public economy. Quarterly Journal of Economics 70: 213-217.

14.

Page, T. , L. Putterman , and B. Unel . 2002. Voluntary association in public goods experiments: Reciprocity, mimicry, and efficiency. Working Paper, Department of Economics, Brown University, Providence.

15.

Riley, J. 1979. Information equilibrium. Econometrica 47: 331-360.

16.

Roth, A. E. 2002. The economist as engineer: Game theory, experimental economics and computation as tools of design economics. Econometrica 70: 1341-1378.

17.

Samuelson, P. A. 1954. The pure theory of public expenditures. Review of Economics and Statistics 36: 387-389.

18.

Sell, J. , and R. Wilson . 1991. Levels of information and contributions to public goods. Social Forces 70: 107-124.

19.

Siegel, S. , and N. J. Castellan . 2000. Nonparametric statistics for the behavioral sciences, 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.

20.

Spence, A. M. 1973. Job market signaling. Quarterly Journal of Economics 90: 225-243.

21.

Tajfel, H. , and J. C. Turner . 1979. An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In The social psychology of intergroup relations, edited by W. G. Austin and S. Worchel . Monterey, Canada: Brooks/Cole.

22.

Tiebout, C. M. 1956. A pure theory of local expenditures. Journal of Political Economy 64: 416-424.

23.

Weimann, J. 1994. Individual behavior in a free riding experiment. Journal of Public Economics 54: 185-200.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.21 MB

0.00 MB