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Voluntary Contributions to Public Goods; Generosity or Attempted Cooperation

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dc.contributor.author Moir, Robert en_US
dc.date.accessioned 2009-07-31T14:32:33Z
dc.date.available 2009-07-31T14:32:33Z
dc.date.issued 1995 en_US
dc.date.submitted 2008-02-20 en_US
dc.date.submitted 2008-02-20 en_US
dc.identifier.uri https://hdl.handle.net/10535/839
dc.description.abstract "Public goods are goods which are nonexcludable (no one can exclude another's consumption) and nonrival (one person's use does not diminish another individual's consumption). Theory suggests that because agents do not consider the positive benefits realized by others when they make their decisions, they will provide less than the optimal amount of the public good. According to theorists, agents will 'free-ride' on the generosity of others without returning the favour. "In public goods experiments subjects quite regularly provide a level of public good that exceeds the theoretically derived self-interested level. This result has been repeated many times under a variety of experiment treatments. This has led to the hypothesis that people might gain some utility from the act of contributing to the group good; that is, they may obtain utility from being generous. "This paper presents the results of a series of laboratory sessions which distinguish between the effects of generous behavior and attempts at cooperative behavior of a group of subjects participating in a voluntary contributions public goods setting. If generosity has value, then generous subjects should be willing to incur a cost to be generous. Cooperators, on the other hand, do not give for the benefit of others but instead understand the benefits of mutual cooperation as being in their own self-interest. Results suggest that subject behaviour may better be characterized as attempted cooperation rather than generosity." en_US
dc.subject IASC en_US
dc.subject common pool resources en_US
dc.subject public goods and bads en_US
dc.title Voluntary Contributions to Public Goods; Generosity or Attempted Cooperation en_US
dc.type Conference Paper en_US
dc.type.published unpublished en_US
dc.subject.sector Theory en_US
dc.identifier.citationconference Reinventing the Commons, the Fifth Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property en_US
dc.identifier.citationconfdates May 24-28, 1995 en_US
dc.identifier.citationconfloc Bodoe, Norway en_US
dc.submitter.email efcastle@indiana.edu en_US


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