Joint Projects without Commitment

Guilt in voting and public good games

“…An expert in military psychology, Dave Grossman, stresses that individual barriers towards morally problematic activity often break when people become part of teams or groups. 1 In a related vein, studies from social psychology (compare the overviews in Bandura 1999 and 2016) document that diffusion of responsibility and shared guilt reduce moral conscience in people. In addition, a diffused notion of being pivotal can decrease moral feelings (compare Falk and Szech 2014).…”

Dynamic Voluntary Contributions to a Discrete Public Good: Experimental Evidence

“…In the first treatment the cost of provision of the public good, c, represents 60% of the sum of the individual WTP ( 4 i=1 W T P i = 600), that is, the cost of provision is 360 tokens. 1 In the second treatment the cost c represents 80% of the sum of the WTP, that is, 480 tokens. 2 The time interval for contribution, T , is fixed to 90 seconds.…”

“…Intuitively, the only way to obtain a positive payoff is to contribute a total amount that is greater than c. Acting in favour of this objective requires that subjects have to increase their individual contribution. We could distinguish two main types of behaviour: (1) individuals contributing large amount during the 15 first seconds and contributing only slightly thereafter; (2) individuals contributing low amounts during the first 75 seconds and contributing large amounts during the last 15 seconds. There are also individuals following a mixture of type 1 and type 2 behaviours.…”

“…Theory says that, in itself, dynamic structure of contribution to a public good cannot lead to an efficient outcome, see Fersthman and Nitzan (1991), 1 Admati and Perry (1991), Gradstein (1992). The reason for negative results is that introducing dynamics allows individuals to free ride upon future contributions.…”

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“…Bac (1996) studies a repeated game under incomplete information about private costs of contributions, providing the conditions leading the game into a war of attrition where each player waits for the other player to contribute. Admati and Perry (1991) study the pattern of contributions to a public good or project of fixed size. The players in their model make alternating contributions.…”