Getting the Ball Rolling: Voluntary Contributions to a Large-Scale Public Project

Getting the Ball Rolling: Voluntary Contributions to a Large-Scale Public Project

This paper studies dynamic voluntary contributions to large-scale projects. While agents can observe the progress of the project and their own costs of contribution, they have incomplete information about the contribution costs of others. I show that the equilibrium pattern of contributions is influenced by the interplay of two opposing incentives: First, agents prefer to free ride on others fo...

Large-scale Public Project

This paper examines dynamic voluntary contributions to a large-scale project. In equilibrium, contributions are influenced by the interplay of two opposing incentives. While agents prefer to free ride on others for contributions, they also prefer to encourage others to contribute by increasing their own. Main findings of the paper are that (1) agents increase their contributions as the project ...

Dynamic Voluntary Contribution to a Public Project

We consider the dynamic private provision of funds to projects that generate public benefits. Participants have complete information about the environment, but imperfect information about individual actions: each period they observe only the aggregate contribution. Each player may contribute any amount in any period before the contributing horizon is reached. All Nash equilibrium outcomes are c...

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...

Voluntary Contributions to Reduce Expected Public Losses