Revocable commitments to public goods provision under the real‐time protocol of play

Using the real-time protocol of play—a relatively new experimental mechanism in which the order of play and timing of decisions are determined endogenously—we investigate voluntary contributions to the provision of pure public goods. We consider the case where the good is binary, players are asymmetric, communication is prohibited, and all-or-none contributions to the public good can be withdrawn at any time during the round of play. Our results: (1) support an equilibrium in which contributors maximize the sum of their own payoffs; (2) show considerably higher levels of contribution than under the more commonly used simultaneous protocol of play; and (3) exhibit no decrease in level of contribution across multiple iterations of the stage game. On comparing our results to those of Goren et al. (2003), we conclude that modifying the mechanism so that contributions once made cannot be revoked yields significantly higher levels of contribution over the course of the game. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

[1]  N. Kerr.  “Does My Contribution Really Matter?”: Efficacy in Social Dilemmas , 1996 .

[2]  Robyn M. Dawes,et al.  Behavior, communication, and assumptions about other people's behavior in a commons dilemma situation. , 1977 .

[3]  Croson,et al.  Identifiability of Individual Contributions in a Threshold Public Goods Experiment. , 1998, Journal of mathematical psychology.

[4]  N. Kerr.  Norms in social dilemmas , 1995 .

[5]  Amnon Rapoport,et al.  Social loafing vs. social enhancement: Public goods provisioning in real-time with irrevocable commitments , 2003 .

[6]  Ramzi Suleiman,et al.  Positional Order and Group Size Effects in Resource Dilemmas with Uncertain Resources , 1995 .

[7]  A. Bandura.  Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory , 1985 .

[8]  J. Andreoni.  Cooperation in Public-Goods Experiments: Kindness or Confusion? , 1995 .

[9]  N. Kerr.  Efficacy as a causal and moderating variable in social dilemmas. , 1992 .

[10]  John Orbell,et al.  Not me or thee but we: the importance of group identity in eliciting cooperation in dilemma situatio , 1988 .

[11]  A. Rapoport,et al.  Provision of step-level public goods: Effects of different information structures , 1984 .

[12]  Michael McKee,et al.  Voluntary Contribution Games: Efficient Private Provision of Public Goods , 1991 .

[13]  Amnon Rapoport,et al.  Order of play in strategically equivalent games in extensive form , 1997, Int. J. Game Theory.

[14]  Ido Erev,et al.  Provision of Step-Level Public Goods , 1990 .

[15]  Thomas R. Palfrey,et al.  Testing for effects of cheap talk in a public goods game with private information , 1991 .

[16]  U. Fischbacher,et al.  Are People Conditionally Cooperative? Evidence from a Public Goods Experiment , 2001 .

[17]  J. Hovi.  Binary Games as Models of Public Goods Provision , 1986 .

[18]  J. Ledyard.  Public Goods: A Survey of Experimental Research , 1994 .

[19]  Chen,et al.  A Probabilistic Model of Criticality in a Sequential Public Good Dilemma. , 1998, Organizational behavior and human decision processes.

[20]  T. Schelling,et al.  The Strategy of Conflict. , 1961 .

[21]  John Orbell,et al.  The Minimal Contributing Set as a Solution to Public Goods Problems , 1983, American Political Science Review.

[22]  Norbert L. Kerr,et al.  Why Do Cooperators Cooperate?: Efficacy as a Moderator of Social Motive Effects , 1996 .

[23]  Bart J. Wilson,et al.  Incremental Commitment and Reciprocity in a Real-Time Public Goods Game , 2001 .

[24]  T. Yamagishi.  The provision of a sanctioning system as a public good , 1986 .

[25]  Scott Shenker,et al.  Learning in Network Contexts: Experimental Results from Simulations , 2001, Games Econ. Behav..

[26]  A. Rapoport.  Provision of step-level public goods: effects of inequality in resources , 1988 .

[27]  N. Kerr,et al.  Communication, commitment, and cooperation in social dilemma. , 1994 .

[28]  M. Milinski,et al.  Reputation helps solve the ‘tragedy of the commons’ , 2002, Nature.

[29]  Avinash Dixit,et al.  Games of Strategy , 1999 .

[30]  Robert E. Dorsey,et al.  The voluntary contributions mechanism with real time revisions , 1992 .

[31]  Wing Tung Au,et al.  Sequential Choice in a Step-Level Public Goods Dilemma: The Effects of Criticality and Uncertainty , 1996 .

[32]  E. Fehr.  A Theory of Fairness, Competition and Cooperation , 1998 .

[33]  A. Rapoport,et al.  Provision of step-level public goods: Effects of greed and fear of being gypped , 1989 .

[34]  Barton L. Lipman,et al.  Private provision of public goods can be efficient , 1992 .

[35]  Jane Sell,et al.  Gender, Strategies, and Contributions to Public Goods* , 1997 .

[36]  R. Mark Isaac,et al.  Communication and Free-Riding Behavior: The Voluntary Contribution Mechanism , 1988 .

[37]  E. Fehr,et al.  Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiments , 1999, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[38]  Anatol Rapoport,et al.  Theories of Coalition Formation , 1998 .