Levels of Information and Contributions to Public Goods

The provision of public goods is a social dilemma in which individuals must decide whether to contribute to the group or not to contribute and therefore free ride. We posit that if individuals have information about how each of the other group members has contributed, free riding will occur less frequently than if they do not have this information. If individuals know how others have contributed, they are able to employ trigger strategies. Three experimental treatments are used to test our predictions: (1) no information about other members' contributions, (2) aggregated information about other members' contributions, and (3) individualized information about each member's contribution. We find that contributions to a public good in the individualized information condition are greater than contributions in the other two conditions. However, contribution levels for no information and aggregated information do not differ. A social dilemma is any social situation in which an individual's short-term incentives for not cooperating exceed those for cooperating. However, if individuals do not cooperate, payoffs are lower in the long run (sometimes catastrophically lower) than if all had cooperated (see Dawes 1980). One type of social dilemma involves the provisioning of a public good. A public good is characterized by nonexcludability in consumption so that regardless of whether or not one contributes to it, one shares in its consumption. Examples of public goods include community parks, public radio, television, and national defense. Based upon this characteristic of nonexcludability, most economists have

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