Sustaining cooperation in laboratory public goods experiments: a selective survey of the literature

By Ananish Chaudhuri. 2011

1,428 citations recorded by the source corpus.

I survey the literature post Ledyard (Handbook of Experimental Economics, ed. by J. Kagel, A. Roth, Chap. 2, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1995) on three related issues in linear public goods experiments: (1) conditional cooperation; (2) the role of costly monetary punishments in sustaining cooperation and (3) the sustenance of cooperation via means other than such punishments. Many participants in laboratory public goods experiments are “conditional cooperators” whose contributions to the public good are positively correlated with their beliefs about the average group contribution. Conditional cooperators are often able to sustain high contributions to the public good through costly monetary punishment of free-riders but also by other mechanisms such as expressions of disapproval, advice giving and assortative matching.

Subfields: General Decision Sciences, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0349cfb4c083ba370e13de8447fdc2946efb3983

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Citations in the corpus

Cooperation in small groups: the effect of group size (2013, neutral): “See Ledyard (1995) and Chaudhuri (2011) for reviews of experiments using this framework.”
The framing of games and the psychology of play (2011, neutral): “Yet, numerous experiments have shown that many people do not play accordingly (see the surveys in Ledyard, 1995; Zelmer, 2003; Gächter and Herrmann, 2009; and Chaudhuri, 2011).”
Personality, Punishment and Public Goods: Strategic Shifts towards Cooperation as a Matter of Dispositional Honesty–Humility (2012, result): “…in which games are played in actual groups and with real monetary incentives: in typical PGG experiments, ‘[g]roups of participants on average contribute between 40% and 60%’ (Chaudhuri, 2011, p. 48), which is well in line with the contributions in our current experiments (see Tables 1 and 2).”
Normative conflict and feuds: The limits of self-enforcement (2012, background): “26 Chaudhuri, A. (2011) Sustaining cooperation in laboratory public goods experiments: a Selective Survey of the Literature.”
Leaders as role models and ‘belief managers’ in social dilemmas (2018, background): “Chaudhuri (2011) provides a survey of this literature and Thöni and Volk (2018) a synthesis of the distribution of types across many studies.”
Reward, punishment, and cooperation: a meta-analysis. (2011, methodology): “Moreover, the present meta-analysis complements recent narrative reviews of incentives and cooperation in both economics (Chaudhuri, 2011) and psychology (Shinada & Yamagishi, 2008).”
The behavioral validity of the strategy method in public good experiments (2012, background): “See also Chaudhuri (2011) for a discussion of related literature.”
Trust games: A meta-analysis (2011, background): “…there were few meta-studies before 2000 or so.2 However, in the last few years there has been a proliferation of informal surveys of experimental results (Bowles, 2008; Chaudhuri, 2010; Croson & Gneezy, 2009; Kagel & Roth, 1995), many of which are focused on the trust game (Camerer, 2003, chap.”