Public good provision, in-group cooperation and out-group descriptive norms: A lab experiment

We use a public good experiment to study how in-group cooperation is affected by payoff-irrelevant information about in other groups (i.e., descriptive out-group feedback). find that positive feedback, indicating above-average cooperation, deters low contributors from increasing their contribution towards the average. By contrast, negative which informs participants below-average high decreasing These two effects work together dampen patterns associated with conditional cooperation. Further, we show are stronger for individual-level feedback (comparing individual contributions average) than group-level total members of groups). Interestingly, when allowed avoid information, propensity consult similar and contributors, suggesting acquisition not always self-serving.