Voluntary contributions to reduce expected public losses

Voluntary Contributions to Reduce Expected Public Losses

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 Vote Out Public Ones

Many public goods are supported with both private and public funding. It is often argued that public funding, based on taxes, crowds out private philanthropic contributions. Agents respond to increases in taxes by decreasing their donations. However, the tax level depends on the political equilibrium arising from agents’ voting decisions. In this paper we analyze a variety of motivations for vo...

Conditional Cooperation and Voluntary Contributions to Public Goods

We compare a partners condition where the same small group of subjects plays a repeated public good game to a strangers condition where subjects play this game in changing group formations. Subjects in the partners condition contribute from the first period on significantly more to the public good than subjects in the strangers condition. In the strangers condition, contributions show a continu...

Voluntary contributions to a public good: a natural field experiment

This paper describes the results of a natural field experiment that investigated voluntary contributions to a public good. The experiment took place at an art gallery where admission was free, but donations could be deposited into a transparent box in the foyer. We manipulated the social information available to patrons by altering what was visible in the donation box. In particular, we investi...