Group size and the free-rider hypothesis: A re-examination of old evidence from churches: Comment

Abstract

This paper comments on a recent study by Lipford (1995) which rejects the hypothesis of free ridership. This paper contends that Lipford's analysis suffers from two serious misspecification errors. A re-examination of Lipford's results suggests that free ridership could occur. Other hypotheses, however, are also consistent with the new results.

Friends for (almost) a day: Studying breakaways in cycling races

“…Second, we add to the literature studying social dilemmas in the field. Previous literature in this domain has focused primarily on management of common pool resources (Agrawal & Chhatre, 2006;Agrawal & Gupta, 2005;Casari & Plott, 2003;Casari & Tagliapietra, 2018;Poteete & Ostrom, 2004;Yang et al, 2013), voluntary contributions to public goods (Mitra & Gupta, 2013;Pommerehne, Feld, & Hart, 1994), honor systems (Brudermann, Bartel, Fenzl, & Seebauer, 2015;Haan & Kooreman, 2002;Pruckner & Sausgruber, 2013), and church donations (Lipford, 1995;Zaleski & Zech, 1996). Similar to our study, many of these papers examine the relationship between group size and the outcome of the social dilemma.…”

Free riding and the provision of candy bars

“…Falkinger et al (2000) show that, also when the environment is such that the Nash equilibrium predicts that all participants contribute a strictly positive amount, contributions still have a tendency to fall to the Nash equilibrium level.3 See e.g Isaac et al (1989)Dawes et al (1986) and Ames (1979, 1980) for slightly differing versions of such a framework.4 Reported inIannaccone (1998).5 Lipford (1995) finds no evidence of an effect of membership on giving, butZaleski and Zech (1996) argue that this is due to a misspecification of his model.…”