Social Preferences, Beliefs, and the Dynamics of Free Riding in Public Goods Experiments | Zendy

Urs Fischbacher | Zendy; Simon Gächter | Zendy

AI Assistant Blog Pricing

Home ZAIA Blog

Open Access

Social Preferences, Beliefs, and the Dynamics of Free Riding in Public Goods Experiments

Author(s) -

Urs Fischbacher,

Simon Gächter

Publication year - 2010

Publication title -

american economic review

Language(s) - English

Resource type - Journals

SCImago Journal Rank - 16.936

H-Index - 297

eISSN - 1944-7981

pISSN - 0002-8282

DOI - 10.1257/aer.100.1.541

Subject(s) - public good , free riding , economics , imperfect , dynamics (music) , public goods game , free rider problem , microeconomics , social preferences , public economics , turnover , social psychology , psychology , pedagogy , linguistics , philosophy , incentive , management

One lingering puzzle is why voluntary contributions to public goods decline over time in experimental and real-world settings. We show that the decline of cooperation is driven by individual preferences for imperfect conditional cooperation. Many people's desire to contribute less than others, rather than changing beliefs of what others will contribute over time or people's heterogeneity in preferences makes voluntary cooperation fragile. Universal free riding thus eventually emerges, despite the fact that most people are not selfish. (D12, D 83, H41, Z13)

The content you want is available to Zendy users.

Already have an account? Click here to sign in.

Having issues? You can contact us here

Accelerating Research