The voluntary provision of a public good with binding multi-round commitments

Abstract

This paper examines binding multi-round commitments to the group account in a repeated voluntary contributions mechanism (VCM) game. Before each five-round interval, subjects in a four-person group are given the option to commit a portion of their endowments to the group account for each of the next five rounds. Decision rounds proceed, with each subject's commitment acting as the binding minimum of his group-account allocation for each round. The opportunity to make multi-round commitments does not increase mean allocations to the group account relative to a control treatment. However, commitments do have implications for reciprocal behavior within groups, leading to higher outcome variances across groups in the multi-round commitments treatment.