Conditional cooperation and voluntary contributions to a public good

Abstract

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.Conditional Co-operation