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How the incentive to contribute affects contributions in the one-shot public goods game

Journal Contribution - Journal Article

Enmeshed in various social structures, humans must often weigh their own interest against the interest of others-including the common interest of groups they belong to. The Public Goods Game (PGG), which succinctly pits individual interest against group interest, has been a staple of research into how people make such decisions. It has been studied in many variations, in the laboratory and (increasingly) online. One of the defining parameters of the PGG is the marginal per capita return of the group project (MPCR), which determines the incentive for contributing to the group project relative to the incentive of keeping points in the personal account. The effect of MPCR on contributions has been investigated before, but its effects have never been characterised with high resolution. Here, we present a systematic and high-resolution investigation of the effect of MPCR in groups of three. We do this in a large-scale online decision making experiment recruiting participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our results provide a fine-grained account of the relationship between incentive to cooperate on the one hand and cooperation on the other, and can help to provide a basis for choosing MPCR magnitudes for future research endeavours using online PGG studies.
Journal: Scientific Reports
ISSN: 2045-2322
Issue: 1
Volume: 10
Publication year:2020
BOF-keylabel:yes
IOF-keylabel:yes
BOF-publication weight:2
CSS-citation score:1
Authors from:Higher Education
Accessibility:Open