Measuring conditional cooperation: a replication study in Russia

We replicate the strategy-method experiment by Fischbacher et al. (Econ. Lett. 71:397–404, 2001) developed to measure attitudes towards cooperation in a one-shot public goods game. We collected data from 160 students at four different universities across urban and rural Russia. Using the classification proposed by Fischbacher et al. (2001) we find that the distribution of types is very similar across the four locations. The share of conditional cooperators in our Russian subject pools is comparable to the one found by Fischbacher et al. in a Swiss subject pool. However, the distribution of the other types differs from the one found in Switzerland.

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