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Doing good or doing harm: experimental evidence on giving and taking in public good games

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Menusch Khadjavi  and
Andreas Lange
Menusch Khadjavi*
Affiliation:
University of Kiel and Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Kiel, Germany
Andreas Lange*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, University of Hamburg, Von Melle Park 5, 20146 Hamburg, Germany
*
menusch.khadjavi@ifw-kiel.de
andreas.lange@wiso.uni-hamburg.de
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Abstract

We replicate Andreoni (Quarterly Journal of Economics 110: 1–21, 1995)’s finding that agents behave more selfishly when taking from a public account than when giving to a public good. Based on a neutral language setting we add new insights into motivations to give or take in a linear public good setting: we find that Andreoni’s result is partly driven by the complete elimination of giving options in the taking frame. However, a pure extension of the action space into the taking domain also leads to a significant increase in selfish behavior.

Keywords

Public goodVoluntary provisionTakingExperiments

JEL classification

H41: Public Goods C91: Laboratory, Individual Behavior
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 432 - 441
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-014-9411-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

We thank participants of the 2011 ESA European Conference in Luxembourg, 2011 EAERE Annual Conference in Rome, the 2011 Florence Workshop on Behavioral and Experimental Economics, and seminar participants at several universities for helpful comments.

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Appendix – Experimental Instructions
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