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Detecting motives for cooperation in public goods experiments

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Abstract

This study clarifies the types of motives that are important as a source of cooperation in a linear public goods experiment. Our experimental design separates contributions into those due to confusion, one-shot motives (which includes altruism, warm-glow, inequality aversion, and conditional cooperation), and multi-round motives (which includes a strategic motive under incomplete information, a failure of backward induction, and reciprocity). The experiment reveals that multi-round motives plays an important role in driving cooperative behavior. Confusion and one-shot motives play a minor role.

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Notes

  1. Jacobson and Petrie (2014) find that a change in information provision increases contribution to the public good due to direct reciprocity by 14 %.

  2. Some papers try to separate strategic motives from pro-social motives in indefinitely-repeated games (e.g., Reuben and Suetens 2012; Cabral et al. 2014; Dreber et al. 2014).

  3. Ferraro et al. (2003) also use computer players to separate out the motives for cooperation, and find that other-regarding behavior elevates contributions in public goods experiments. Cox (2004) discriminates between transfers due to trust or reciprocity and transfers due to other-regarding preferences that are not conditional on the behavior of others in a trust game, by comparing between different treatments.

  4. This nomenclature is imperfect because conditional cooperation is not a one-shot type motive. However, we use it because meaningful name will be helpful for readers to read.

  5. Cason et al. (2002), Van Dijk et al. (2002), Cason et al. (2004), and Yamakawa (2012) also adopt a two-player public goods game and a detailed payoff table. Of these studies, Cason et al. (2002), Van Dijk et al. (2002), and Cason et al. (2004) examined non-linear public goods games with interior Nash or dominant strategy equilibria. Yamakawa (2012) examined a linear public goods game. The data in Van Dijk et al. (2002) and Yamakawa (2012) has a similar pattern to that in our experiment. They observe stable or slightly increasing contributions over time, and sudden cooperative decay in the last round. Cason et al. (2002) and Cason et al. (2004) do not observe such a pattern. Charness et al. (2004) conduct gift exchange experiments and show that the behavior is significantly sensitive to whether the subject is provided a detailed payoff table.

  6. Subjects in the C condition are not informed that the choices of the computer are human actions’ data of the previous experimental session.

  7. One might think that contributions due to warm-glow may also occur in the C condition by its definition. However, if we interpret that warm-glow is realized through interaction with the other people, it does not work in the C condition.

  8. 1 US dollar was about 95 yen at the time when the experiment took place in Osaka, and about 118 yen when we moved to Kochi.

  9. \(p=0.113\) in round 2, \(p=0.190\) in round 3, \(p=0.082\) in round 4, \(p=0.154\) in round 6, \(p=0.082\) in round 8, \(p=0.202\) in round 10, and \(p=0.063\) in round 19.

  10. \(p=0.080\) in rounds 1, 2, 3, 10, 17, 18, and 19; \(p=0.165\) in rounds 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, and 12; \(p=1.000\) in rounds 5, 13, 14, 15, and 16.

  11. The absence of decay in the HC and C conditions is partly because the contributions in the HC and C conditions are very low throughout the experiment, and hence there is little room for decay.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Takao Kusakawa, Kan Takeuchi, Guillaume Fréchette, and the participants at the 13th Experimental Social Sciences Conference at Kobe University, the seminar at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the 2011 meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Science Association at University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, Experimental Social Sciences Workshop at Osaka University, the 11th Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory Conference, and the 14th International Conference on Social Dilemmas for their helpful comments and discussions. The present version of this paper has benefited from the comments of the editor and two referees. This research was supported by KAKENHI (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan) on Priority Areas “Experimental Social Science.” The authors are responsible for any remaining errors that may occur.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University, 6-1 Mihogaoka, Ibaraki, Osaka, 567-0047, Japan

    Takafumi Yamakawa

  2. School of Economics and Management, Kochi University of Technology, 2-22 Eikokujicho, Kochi, 780-8515, Japan

    Yoshitaka Okano

  3. Research Center for Social Design Engineering, Kochi University of Technology, 2-22 Eikokujicho, Kochi, 780-8515, Japan

    Tatsuyoshi Saijo

  4. Center for Environmental Innovation Design for Sustainability, Osaka University, 2-1 Yamadaoka, Suita, Osaka, 565-0871, Japan

    Tatsuyoshi Saijo

  5. Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, 2-1 Naka, Kunitachi, Tokyo, 186-8601, Japan

    Tatsuyoshi Saijo

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  1. Takafumi Yamakawa
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  2. Yoshitaka Okano
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  3. Tatsuyoshi Saijo
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Correspondence to Yoshitaka Okano.

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Yamakawa, T., Okano, Y. & Saijo, T. Detecting motives for cooperation in public goods experiments. Exp Econ 19, 500–512 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-015-9451-2

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