Portal Red Investigadores de Economía

Experimental and empirical evidence identifies the existence of social preferences and proposes competing models of such preferences. In this paper, we further examine one such social preference: conditional cooperation. We run three experimental public goods games, the traditional voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM, also called the linear public goods game), the weak-link mechanism (WLM) and the best-shot mechanism (BSM). We then analyze the existence and types of conditional cooperation observed. We find that participants are responsive to the past contributions of others in all three games, but are most responsive to different contributions in each game: the median in the VCM, the minimum in the WLM and the maximum in the BSM. We conclude by discussing implications of these differences for behavior in these three mechanisms. This paper thus refines our notions of conditional cooperation to allow for different types of public good production functions and by extension, other contexts.

An Experimental Analysis of Conditional Cooperation