Private provision of a public good: cooperation and altruism of internet forum users

Abstract

Abstract:We ran an experiment with users of Internet forums. In a dictator game, we find that the level of altruism is positively related to the activity in the forum. In a public good game, there is no relation between cooperation in the game and contribution to the content of the forum. Subjects are not more altruistic with partners from the same forum but do cooperate more with them. These results suggest that the public good provided in Internet forums is mainly provided by a group of unconditional altruistic users, and that the sense of belonging supports the cooperation in that provision.Keywords: Altruism, belonging, cooperation, Internet forums, public good provision Acknowledgements: We are indebted to Hubert J. Kiss and Ismael RodriguezLara for their comments and suggestions. This paper has benefited from suggestions provided by participants at I IMEBESS at Oxford, SING10 at Krakow and a seminar at UCAM. We want to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their extemely useful feedback. Alfonso Rosa-Garcia thanks CICYT for its support through grant ECO2013-45698.

The Patron Game: the Individual Provision of a Public Good

“…Our paper provides evidence concerning the individual determinants to contributions thanks to an element of methodological originality represented by how our experimental design disentangles the 2 The fact that contributing to Open Collaboration projects has mainly an unconditional nature is consistent with the evidence provided by [7]. They find that the intensity of the activity of forum users positively correlates with their contribution in a Dictator Game but not in a VCM.…”

“…He finds higher contributions in the Give condition. 7 Reference [27] report that these demand effects causally affect second-order beliefs about contributions, i.e., how much subjects believe that others (the opponents as well as the experimenters) expect them to contribute. Reference [27] also show that second order beliefs significantly correlate with actual decisions, although no causal inference can be derived.…”