Provision of Step-Level Public Goods

Abstract

Groups of five players participated in a social dilemma game in which each player receives a monetary endowment and then chooses whether to contribute it to a monetary public good. The good is provided to all group members if at least three contributions are made; it is not provided, otherwise. Experiment 1 showed that the simultaneous protocol of play—where decisions are made privately and anonymously—is significantly less effective in solving the dilemma than the sequential protocol—where decisions are made sequentially with complete information about previous decisions in the sequence. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and, in addition, showed that the sequential protocol with only information about previous noncooperative choices is significantly more effective in solving the dilemma than the sequential protocol with only information about previous cooperative choices.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Barry, B. , and R. Hardin , eds. 1982. Rational man and irrational society? Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Dawes, R. M. 1980. Social dilemmas. Annual Review of Psychology 31:169-193.

Dawes, R. M. , J. M. Orbell , R. T. Simmons and A. J. C. Van de Kragt . 1986. Organizing groups for collective action. American Political Science Review 80:1171-1185.

Erev, I. 1989. Cooperative behavior in structurally distinct public goods problems: Effects of sequentially acquired information. M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Hampton, J. 1987. Free-rider problems in the production of collective goods. Economics and Philosophy 3:245-273.

Hardin, R. 1971. Collective action as an agreeable n-Prisoners' Dilemma. Behavioral Sciences 16:472-481.

Harrison, G. W. , and J. Hirshleifer . 1989. An experimental evaluation of weakest-link/best-shot models of public goods. Journal of Political Economics 97:201-225.

Hovi, J. 1986. Binary games as models of public goods provision. Scandinavian Political Studies 9:337-360.

Liebrand, W.B.G. 1983. A classification of social dilemma games. Simulation and Games 14:123-138.

10.

Margolis, H. 1982. Selfishness, altruism and rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

11.

McKelvey, R. D. 1988. Evolutionary explanations of rationality paradoxes. Manuscript.

12.

Messick, D. M. , and M. B. Brewer . 1983. Solving social dilemmas: A review. In Review of personality and social psychology, Vol. 4, edited by L. Wheeler and P. Shaver , 11-44. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

13.

Olson, M., Jr. 1965. The logic of collective action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

14.

Palfrey, T. R., and H. Rosenthal. 1985. Private incentives in social dilemmas. Manuscript.

15.

Rapoport, A. 1985. Provision of public goods and the MCS experimental paradigm. American Political Science Review 79:148-155.

16.

Rapoport, A. 1988. Provision of step-level public goods: Effects of inequality in resources. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54:432-440.

17.

Rapoport, A. , and D. Eshed-Levy . 1989. Provision of step-level public goods: Effects of greed and fear of being gypped. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 44:325-344.

18.

Roth, A. E. 1987. Bargaining phenomena and bargaining theory. In Laboratory experimentation in economics: Six points of view, edited by A. E. Roth , 14-41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

19.

Rutte, C. G. , H.A.M. Wilke , and D. M. Messick . 1987. Scarcity or abundance caused by people or the environment as determinants of behavior in the resource dilemma. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 23:208-216.

20.

Selten, R. 1987. Equity and coalition bargaining in experimental three-person games. In Laboratory experimentation in economics: Six points of view, edited by A. E. Roth , 42-98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

21.

Taylor, M. 1987. The possibility of cooperation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

22.

Taylor, M. , and H. Ward . 1982. Chickens, whales, and lumpy goods: Alternative models of public-goods provisions. Political Studies 30:350-370.

23.

Van de Kragt, A.J.C. , J. M. Orbell , and R. M. Dawes . 1983. The minimal contributing set as a solution to public goods problems. American Political Science Review 77:112-122.

24.

Yamagishi, T. , and K. Sato . 1986. Motivational bases of the public goods problem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 50:67-73.