Explaining Private Provision of Public Goods by Conditional Cooperation
نویسنده
چکیده
We adopt an evolutionary approach to investigate whether and when conditional cooperation can explain the voluntary contribution phenomenon often observed in public goods experiments and in real life. Formally, conditional cooperation is captured by a regret parameter describing how much an individual regrets to contribute less than the average. We find that the evolutionary stability of conditional cooperation depends on what is known about the (individual) regret parameters of other group members.
منابع مشابه
Toward an efficiency rationale for the public provision of private goods
Public provision of a private goods is justified on efficiency grounds in a modelwith no redistributive preferences. A government’s involvement in the provision of a private good generates information about preferences that facilitatesmore efficient revenue extraction for the provision of public goods. Public provision of the private good improves economic efficiency under a condition that is a...
متن کاملWhy Quorum Sensing Controls Private Goods
Cell-cell communication, also termed quorum sensing (QS), is a widespread process that coordinates gene expression in bacterial populations. The generally accepted view is that QS optimizes the cell density-dependent benefit attained from cooperative behaviors, often in the form of secreted products referred to as "public goods." This view is challenged by an increasing number of cell-associate...
متن کاملSustaining cooperation in laboratory public goods experiments: a selective survey of the literature
I survey the literature post Ledyard (Handbook of Experimental Economics, ed. by J. Kagel, A. Roth, Chap. 2, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1995) on three related issues in linear public goods experiments: (1) conditional cooperation; (2) the role of costly monetary punishments in sustaining cooperation and (3) the sustenance of cooperation via means other than such punishments. Many pa...
متن کاملThe Provision of Public Goods with Positive Group Interdependencies by Werner Güth
This article examines the nature of human behavior in a nested social dilemma referred to as the Spillover Game. Players are divided into two groups with positive production interdependencies. Based on theoretically derived opportunistic, local, and global optima, our experimental results demonstrate the importance of in-group beneficiaries over global efficiency. We find that the observed beha...
متن کاملSwords without Covenants Do Not Lead to Self-Governance*
This paper presents an experimental study of two mechanisms for managing common property resources. A decentralized peer punishment mechanism (swords) has been shown to increase cooperation in related social dilemmas, but only with linear private benefits and costs of public goods provision. We investigate the effectiveness of this mechanism for a more realistic nonlinear public goods environme...
متن کامل