Heterogeneous Social Preferences and the Dynamics of Free Riding in Public Goods

By Urs Fischbacher, Simon Gächter. Social Science Research Network, 2006

147 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We provide a direct test of the role of social preferences in voluntary cooperation. We elicit individuals’ cooperation preference in one experiment and make a point prediction about the contribution to a repeated public good. This allows for a novel test as to whether there are "types" of players who behave consistently with their elicited preferences. We find clear-cut evidence for the existence of "types". People who express free rider preferences show the most systematic deviation from the predicted contributions, because they contribute in the first half of the experiment. We also show that the interaction of heterogeneous types explains a large part of the dynamics of free riding.

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Citations in the corpus

Environmental Policy Theory Given Bounded Rationality and Other-regarding Preferences (2011, background): “For instance, Fischbacher and Gächter (2006), performing a public good experiment, find heterogeneity of social preferences.”
Social learning and voluntary cooperation among like-minded people (2005, background): “The conditional cooperators cooperate if sufficiently many others cooperate as well (e.g., Keser and van Winden 2000; Fischbacher, Gächter, and Fehr 2001; Croson 2002; Falk and Fischbacher 2002; Burlando and Guala 2004; Fischbacher and Gächter 2004).”
The strategy versus the direct-response method: a first survey of experimental comparisons (2011, unknown): “Fischbacher and Gächter (2006) consider a version of the public-goods game.”
Measuring conditional cooperation: a replication study in Russia (2009, result): “The share of conditional cooperators is surprisingly similar to the results reported in Fischbacher et al. (2001) and a subsequent study by Fischbacher and Gächter (2006).”
Cooperation in primates and humans : mechanisms and evolution (2006, background): “15.3 contains the pooled results of the experiments by Fischbacher et al. (2001) and Fischbacher & Gächter (2004) who conducted their experiments in Switzerland with n = 44 and n = 140 subjects, respectively.”
The effects of (incentivized) belief elicitation in public goods experiments (2010, background): “ Fischbacher and Gachter (2006) in the context of a ten times repeated public good experiment”
Selfish-biased conditional cooperation: On the decline of contributions in repeated public goods experiments (2009, background): “All rights reserved. fax: +352 466644 6835. gebauer). erman, 1999; Keser & van Winden, 2000; Brandts & Schram, 2001; Fischbacher, Gächter, & Fehr, 2001; auer, 2005; Fischbacher & Gächter, 2006; Croson, 2007).”
Human Motivation and Social Cooperation: Experimental and Analytical Foundations (2007, background): “Importantly, however, the vast majority of subjects can be either classified as purely self-regarding and conditionally cooperative – a fact that has since been frequently replicated (e.g., Fischbacher and Gächter 2006).”
Strategic Behavior and Learning in Repeated Voluntary-Contribution Experiments (2008, methodology): “Although the two methods are equivalent from a standard theoretical point of view, there are plausible behavioral reasons why differences may emerge (see the discussions in Roth, 1995 or Brandts and Charness, 2000).”
Choosing the Carrot or the Stick? Endogenous Institutional Choice in Social Dilemma Situations (2010, background): “Voters, however, do not contribute significantly more than non-voters from the second period on, which is a possible indication that voters are conditional cooperators (Fischbacher et al., 2001; Fischbacher and Gächter, 2006; Gächter, 2007) who react to the contributions of nonvoters.”