Sequential versus Simultaneous Contributions to Public Goods: Experimental Evidence

Social Science Research Network, 2009

159 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report an experiment comparing sequential and simultaneous contributions to a public good in a quasi-linear two-person setting (Varian, Journal of Public Economics, 1994). Our findings support the theoretical argument that sequential contributions result in lower overall provision than simultaneous contributions. However, the distribution of contributions is not as predicted: late contributors are sometimes willing to punish early low contributors by contributing less than their best response. This induces early contributors to contribute more than they otherwise would. A consequence of this is that we fail to observe a predicted first mover advantage.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/49ef4cf06970800bc084489a8296138b58705777

Citations in the corpus

• Leadership and the voluntary provision of public goods: Field evidence from Bolivia (2015, unknown): “…(Varian 1994), information signaling (Hermalin 1998; Vesterlund 2003; Potters et al. 2005, 2007; Andreoni 2006; Hermalin 2007; Bag & Roy 2011), reciprocity (Andreoni et al. 2002; Meidinger & Villeval 2002; Gächter et al. 2010b) and social status (Kumru & Vesterlund 2010; Eckel et al. 2010).”