The strategy method conflates confusion with conditional cooperation in public goods games: evidence from large scale replications (original) (raw)
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The strategy method is often used in public goods games to measure an individual’s willingness to cooperate depending on the level of cooperation by their groupmates (conditional cooperation). However, while the strategy method is informative, it risks conflating confusion with a desire for fair outcomes, and its presentation may risk inducing elevated levels of conditional cooperation. This problem was highlighted by two previous studies which found that the strategy method could also detect equivalent levels of cooperation even among those grouped with computerized groupmates, indicative of confusion or irrational responses. However, these studies did not use large samples (n = 40 or 72) and only made participants complete the strategy method one time, with computerized groupmates, preventing within-participant comparisons. Here, in contrast, 845 participants completed the strategy method two times, once with human and once with computerized groupmates. Our research aims were twof...
Revisiting confusion in public goods experiments
2000
Theories put forth to explain cooperation in public goods experiments usually assume either that subjects cooperate because they do not understand the game's incentives or that cooperation stems from social motives such as altruism and reciprocity. Recent research by Andreoni is an important first attempt to distinguish the roles of confusion and social motives in these environments.
Conditional cooperation: new evidence from a public goods experiment
2002
We extend Fischbacher et al.'s (2001) work on conditional cooperation, comparing the results obtained by means of the Strategy Method with behaviour in a classic linear public goods environment. We find that the Strategy Method is roughly adequate as a classification device, but underestimates the contribution of conditional cooperators in the public goods game.
Reciprocity in groups: information‐seeking in a public goods game
2008
Questions remain about the details of the reciprocal strategies people use in the context of group cooperation. Here we report an experiment in which participants in public goods games could access information about the lowest, median, or highest contribution to the public good before making their own contribution decisions. Results suggest that people have clear preferences for particular pieces of information and that information preferences vary systematically across individuals as a function of their contribution strategies. Specifically, participants playing reciprocal strategies sought information about the median contribution, free riders preferred to view the highest contribution, and altruists had inconsistent preferences. By including a treatment in which people could pay to see information rather than obtaining it for free, we found that people were willing to incur costs to acquire information, particularly those using a reciprocal strategy. Further, adding a cost to view information decreased aggregate contributions, possibly because the motivation to induce others' reciprocal contributions diminished under these conditions.
Journal of Economic Psychology, 2010
This study analyses the behavior in a repeated public goods game when subjects know about the possibility of existence of strict conditional cooperators. We employed a baseline treatment and a threat treatment in which subjects are informed about the possibility of being in a group together with automata playing a grim trigger strategy. We conjecture the resulting game allows for almost fully efficient outcomes. Contributions in the threat treatment increase by 40% before a surprise restart, and by 50% after the surprise restart. In line with the grim trigger strategy subjects contribute either all or nothing in the threat treatment.
Conditional cooperation and voluntary contributions to a public good
2006
We explore facets of conditional cooperation in a public goods game. First, we replicate the Fischbacher, Gächter and Fehr (2001) result that the majority of subjects in public goods experiments are conditional cooperators. Next, given that the majority of subjects in our study are conditional cooperators, we look at what happens when subjects are given additional information about the presence of conditional cooperators in the group. We find that such information about the presence of conditional cooperators leads to an increase in contributions overall. However this increase in contributions is most pronounced for the conditional cooperators. We are grateful to the University of Auckland Research Council for providing the funds to conduct the experiments for this study. We thank Professor Charles Holt for providing us access to the Veconlab website at the University of Virginia for carrying out our experiments. An anonymous referee provided extremely useful feedback which is much appreciated. We thank Ankit Shah for helping us with the running of experimental sessions. The usual disclaimer applies.
PLoS ONE, 2021
Many practitioners as well as researchers explore promoting environmentally conscious behavior in the context of public goods systems. Numerous experimental studies revealed various types of incentives to increase cooperation on public goods. There is ample evidence that monetary and non-monetary incentives, such as donations, have a positive effect on cooperation in public goods games that exceeds fully rational and optimal economic decision making. Despite an accumulation of these studies, in the typical setting of these experiments participants decide on an allocation of resources to a public pool, but they never exert actual effort. However, in reality, we often observe that players’ real effort is required in these public goods game situations. Therefore, more analysis is needed to draw conclusions for a wider set of incentive possibilities in situations similar to yet deviating from resource allocation games. Here we construct a real effort public goods game in an online exper...
Journal of Economic Psychology, 2009
In the recent literature, several hypotheses have been put forward in order to explain the decline of contributions in repeated public good games. We present results of an experiment which allows to evaluate these hypotheses. The main characteristics of our experimental design are a variation of information feedback and an elicitation of individual beliefs about others' contributions. Altogether, our data support the hypothesis of conditional cooperation with a selfish bias.
Strategic thinking in public goods games with teams
Journal of Public Economics, 2018
We experimentally investigate motives for cooperation by studying team play and team chat logs in public goods games. Subjects are matched into teams of two, and each team makes a single joint decision in each period. We compare the teams with individuals under both Partners and Strangers matching protocols, using team chat logs to better understand how subjects perceive and reason about the game. We find teams and individuals to be similar in overall cooperation. However, we find stronger initial cooperation and more pronounced endgame effects among teams. While we find little difference in overall cooperation between Partners and Strangers, we find that Partners discuss future cooperation, but not past outcomes, more frequently than Strangers. Overall, we find the main drivers of cooperation to be repeated game effects and limited backward induction. We also find some evidence of confusion, and but surprisingly little evidence of pro-social preference as a driver of contribution.
Human cooperation in changing groups in a large-scale public goods game
Nature Communications
How people cooperate to provide public goods is an important scientific question and relates to many societal problems. Previous research studied how people cooperate in stable groups in repeated or one-time-only encounters. However, most real-world public good problems occur in groups with a gradually changing composition due to old members leaving and new members arriving. How group changes are related to cooperation in public good provision is not well understood. To address this issue, we analyze a dataset from an online public goods game comprising approximately 1.5 million contribution decisions made by about 135 thousand players in about 11.3 thousand groups with about 234 thousand changes in group composition. We find that changes in group composition negatively relate to cooperation. Our results suggest that this is related to individuals contributing less in the role of newcomers than in the role of incumbents. During the process of moving from newcomer status to incumbent...