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Conditional cooperation and group size: experimental evidence from a public good game

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 January 2025

Tianyi Li  and
Charles N. Noussair Open the ORCID record for Charles N. Noussair [Opens in a new window]
Tianyi Li
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
Charles N. Noussair*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
*
e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Conditional cooperation is the tendency to cooperate if and only if others do so as well. It is the most common behavior in social dilemmas. We study how the incidence of conditional cooperation in the public goods game, the most widely studied social dilemma in experimental economics, varies with group size. In a laboratory experiment, we apply the strategy method to elicit how participants’ willingness to contribute to a public good depends on other group members’ decisions. A within-subject design allows us to evaluate and compare an individual participant's contribution behavior in different-sized groups. Two main findings emerge. First, the share of players who are conditional cooperators is consistent across group sizes. Second, the strategies chosen imply that conditional cooperators hold a (correct) belief that others are more cooperative in a larger than in a smaller group.

Keywords

Conditional cooperationPublic goodsStrategy methodGroup size

JEL classification

H41: Public Goods C9: Design of Experiments
Type
Original Paper
Information
Journal of the Economic Science Association , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , June 2024 , pp. 98 - 112
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Economic Science Association 2023.

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Footnotes

We thank the Economic Science Lab at the University of Arizona for funding this project. We thank Price Fishback, Tamar Kugler, Stanley Reynolds, and Julian Romero for helpful comments.

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