Does Public Policy Crowd Out Private Contributions to Public Goods?

Potential follow-up increases private contributions to public goods.

People contribute more to public goods when their contributions are made more observable to others. We report an intervention that subtly increases the observability of public goods contributions when people are solicited privately and impersonally (e.g., mail, email, social media). This intervention is tested in a large-scale field experiment (n = 770,946) in which people are encouraged to vot...

Commitment and Matching Contributions to Public Goods

This paper studies multi-stage processes of non-cooperative voluntary provision of public goods. In the first stage, one or more players announce contributions that may be conditional on the subsequent contributions of others. In later stages, players choose their own contributions and fulfill any commitments made in the first stage. Equilibrium contributions are characterized under different a...

Public Supply of Private Goods

On Modeling Voluntary Contributions to Public Goods

This paper addresses four “stylized facts” that summarize data from experimental studies of voluntary contributions to provision of public goods. Theoretical propositions and testable hypotheses for voluntary contributions are derived from two models of social preferences, the inequity aversion model and the egocentric other-regarding preferences model. We …nd that the egocentric other-regardin...

Public Provision of Private Goods

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