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Voluntary Participation and Spite in Public Good Provision Experiments: An International Comparison

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Timothy N. Cason ,
Tatsuyoshi Saijo  and
Takehiko Yamato
Timothy N. Cason*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Krannert School of Management, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907-1310, USA
Tatsuyoshi Saijo*
Affiliation:
Inst. of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University, 6-1 Mihogaoka, Ibaraki, Osaka 567-0047, Japan
Takehiko Yamato*
Affiliation:
Department of Value and Decision Science, Graduate School of Decision Science and Technology, Tokyo Institute of Technology, 2-12-1 Ookayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 152-8552, Japan
*
email: cason@mgmt.purdue.edu
email: saijo@iser.osaka-u.ac.jp
email: yamato@valdes.titech.ac.jp
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Abstract

This paper studies voluntary public good provision in the laboratory, in a cross-cultural experiment conducted in the United States and Japan. Our environment differs from the standard voluntary contribution mechanism because subjects first decide whether or not to participate in providing this non-excludable public good. This participation decision is conveyed to the other subject prior to the subjects’ contribution decisions. We find that only the American data are consistent with the evolutionary-stable-strategy Nash equilibrium predictions, and that behavior is significantly different across countries. Japanese subjects are more likely to act spitefully in the early periods of the experiment, even though our design changes subject pairings each period so that no two subjects ever interact twice. Surprisingly, this spiteful behavior eventually leads to more efficient public good contributions for Japanese subjects than for American subjects.

Keywords

fairnessother regarding preferencessubject poolsculture

JEL classification

H41: Public Goods C90: General D70: General
Type
Research Article
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , October 2002 , pp. 133 - 153
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 Economic Science Association

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