Should I organize the conference ? Cut -

We study a public goods experiment where just one decision maker of a group (‘organizer’) has to decide whether or not to provide the good. The others in the group (‘visitors’) do not make a decision. We find that organizers update their beliefs about the next organizer providing the public good based on their own decisions in accordance with learning direction theory. This calls for a more sophisticated learning model than those of adaptive learning. Moreover, our results show that the additional information of reported beliefs about others providing the public good can explain decisions more accurate. We show that a reciprocal decision rule involving a cut-point belief of 50% performs astonishingly well in all treatments.