Cooperation in Public Goods Games Predicts Behavior in Incentive‐matched Binary Dilemmas: Evidence for Stable Prosociality

Abstract

We report the results of an experiment in which subjects completed second mover public goods game tasks and second mover binary social dilemma tasks. Each task was completed under three different incentive structures which were matched across tasks. The use of nonlinear incentive structures, along with a novel categorization method, allowed us to identify behavioral subtypes that cannot be distinguished using conventional linear incentive structures. We also examined how well behavior could be predicted across tasks. Subjects' average conditional cooperation levels showed significant cross‐task predictability and stability. However, almost a third of responses (28%) demonstrated unambiguous preference reversals across tasks. We argue that prosociality is best described as an individual‐level trait, similar to risk aversion in choice under risk. (JEL C7, C91, H41)

Alcohol unleashes homo economicus by inhibiting cooperation

“…Those who contribute benefit others in the group, but risk being taken advantage of by non-contributors ("free-riders"). Earnings are highest when a participant free-rides by contributing zero while others contribute nonzero amounts [ 64 ]. Participants made four decisions in the PGG without feedback and were informed that zTree would randomly re-match them with others in each round.…”

Coexistence of coordination and anticoordination in nonlinear public goods game

“…As motivated in the introduction of this paper, the accumulated contribution from each subpopulation may not increase linearly. Thus, we consider for generality a nonlinear payoff function [27]-with an extra parameter, β ∈ R + is addition to the usual synergy factor, α ∈ R + -that can be concave or convex depending on the parameters. We call β synergy exponent in this paper.…”

“…The nonlinear PGG is simple to understand: all it captures is the realistic fact that the increment in benefit, owing to contributing additional cost, either diminishes [26] or increases. The former effect can be captured by a concave function of the total contribution and the latter by a convex function [27].…”

Social Preferences and the Variability of Conditional Cooperation

“…They measure parameters of disadvantageous and advantageous inequality aversion (Fehr and Schmidt (1999)) using ultimatum and modified dictator games and then have the same subjects play among others an SPD and a public good. They find that the elicited preference parameters predict decisions at the aggregate level but not so much at the individual 3 Two further studies (Eichenseer and Moser (2020) and Mullett, et al (2020)) examine the variability of conditional cooperation across different contexts by comparing behavior in a public goods game and a SPD. Both studies report that subjects who are conditionally cooperative in a SPD are also conditionally cooperative in a public goods game.…”