Confusion and Learning in the Public Goods Game
نویسندگان
چکیده
We test if confusion and learning could potentially explain all the decay of contributions in the repeated public goods games by implementing a limited information environment to mimic the state of confusion. A comparison shows that the rate of decline is more than twice as high in a standard public goods game. Furthermore, we find that simple learning cannot generate the contribution dynamics, which are commonly attributed to the existence of conditional cooperators. We conclude that cooperative behavior observed in public goods games is not a pure artefact of confusion and learning.
منابع مشابه
Revisiting Kindness and Confusion in Public Goods Experiments: Comment∗
We present a novel experiment to evaluate the role of confusion in explaining the dynamics of contributions in public goods experiments. In a learning condition we keep the subjects confused by withholding the information that would be necessary for them to understand the game. The comparison of the results with those of a standard public goods treatment provides a lower bound for the influence...
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