New Working Paper from Bradley Ruffle

We have a new working paper from Bradley Ruffle!

A Breakdown of Cooperation in Public Goods Games

Bradley Ruffle is a Professor for the Department of Economics. His primary research is in behavioral and experimental economics, as well he is the Academic Director for the McMaster Decision Science Laboratory (McDSL). His working paper is titled, “A Breakdown of Cooperation in Public good Games,” joint with our PhD student, Tanzir Rahman Khan.

Abstract

We introduce a new variant of the Public Goods Game (PGG), building on and com bining the frameworks of Fischbacher et al. (2001) and Cheung (2014). We demonstrate that the widely used player categorizations based on players’ responses to others’ average contribution– such as conditional cooperators, free-riders, and hump-shaped cooperators– fail to fully capture players’ conditioning tendencies. Specifically, players are sensitive to the different distributions of contributions that can arise from a given mean, which leads to a re-categorization of players based on distributions compared to their categorization based solely on averages. Furthermore, we elicit beliefs about the most likely distribution of contributions underlying each mean. We find that providing incentives for correct guesses does not improve accuracy. Moreover, cooperators and free-riders hold widely divergent distributional beliefs.

For the full set of working papers, visit RePEC/ideas.