1.Editorial Board
Pages CO2
2. Experimental approaches to public economics: guest editors' introduction
Pages 1355-1359
Andreoni, James and List, John A.
3. An experimental comparison of collective choice procedures for excludable public goods
Pages 1361-1398
Gailmard, Sean and Palfrey, Thomas R.
This paper compares three collective choice procedures for the provision of excludable public goods under incomplete information. One, serial cost sharing (SCS), is budget balanced, individually rational, anonymous and strategy proof. The other two are “hybrid” procedures: voluntary cost sharing with proportional rebates (PCS) and with no rebates (NR). PCS satisfies all these properties except strategy proofness, and NR satisfies all the properties except for...
4. After you—endogenous sequencing in voluntary contribution games
Pages 1399-1419
Potters, Jan, Sefton, Martin and Vesterlund, Lise
We examine contributions to a public good when some donors do not know the true value of the good. If donors in such an environment determine the sequence of moves, two contribution orders may arise as equilibria. Either the uninformed and informed donors contribute simultaneously or the informed contribute prior to the uninformed. Sequential moves result in a larger provision of the public good, because the follower mimics the action of the leader, and in...
5. Cooperation under the threat of expulsion in a public goods experiment
Pages 1421-1435
Cinyabuguma, Matthias, Page, Talbot and Putterman, Louis
In a public goods experiment with the opportunity to vote to expel members of a group, we found that contributions rose to nearly 100% of endowments with significantly higher efficiency compared with a no-expulsion baseline. Our findings support the intuition that the threat of expulsion or ostracism is a device that helps some groups to provide public goods. ...
6. Credible assignments can improve efficiency in laboratory public goods games
Pages 1437-1455
Seely, Beth, Van Huyck, John and Battalio, Raymond
This paper reports an experiment investigating how assignments improve economic efficiency in a modified version of the standard voluntary-contributions mechanism. The experiment uses a non-binding message that makes common information assignments in the repeated game. A credible assignment is one actually followed by the participants. It turns out to be difficult to credibly assign the symmetric efficient outcome in four person cohorts, but we did discover...
7. Cooperation among strangers with limited information about reputation
Pages 1457-1468
Bolton, Gary E., Katok, Elena and Ockenfels, Axel
The amount of institutional intervention necessary to secure efficiency-enhancing cooperation in markets and organizations, in circumstances where interactions take place among essentially strangers, depends critically on the amount of information informal reputation mechanisms need transmit. Models based on subgame perfection find that the information necessary to support cooperation is recursive in nature and thus information generating and processing...
8. Principles of network development and evolution: an experimental study
Pages 1469-1495
Callander, Steven and Plott, Charles R.
This paper reports on an experimental investigation of the evolution of networks and the individual decision-making processes that guide it. Inasmuch as there is no history of experimental work on network formation, part of the paper is devoted to the formulation of problems that can be examined experimentally. The results are that networks, composed of decentralized decision makers, are capable of overcoming complex coordination and learning problems and...
9. Nominal bargaining power, selection protocol, and discounting in legislative bargaining
Pages 1497-1517
Fréchette, Guillaume, Kagel, John H. and Morelli, Massimo
The comparative static predictions of the Baron and Ferejohn [Baron, D.P., and Ferejohn, J.A., (1989). Bargaining in legislatures, American Political Science Review 83 (4), 1181–1206] model better organize behavior in legislative bargaining experiments than Gamson's Law. Regressions similar to those employed in field data produce results seemingly in support of Gamson's Law (even when using data generated by simulating agents who behave according to the...
10. Tax and subsidy incidence equivalence theories: experimental evidence from competitive markets
Pages 1519-1542
Ruffle, Bradley J.
A basic tenet in microeconomics is tax incidence equivalence, which holds that the burden of a unit tax on buyers and sellers is independent of who actually pays the tax. By contrast, policymakers and the public often mistake statutory incidence for economic incidence. Using competitive laboratory markets, I test both tax incidence equivalence and an analogous theorem for subsidies. For sufficiently large markets, the results show strong support for both...
11. An experimental test of the crowding out hypothesis
Pages 1543-1560
Eckel, Catherine C., Grossman, Philip J. and Johnston, Rachel M.
We report the results of laboratory experiments that examine whether third-party contributions crowd out private giving to charity. Subjects play a single dictator game with a charity as the recipient. The subject chooses his preferred charity from a list. There are four treatment combinations: two initial allocations and two frames. Initial allocations are either US$18 for the subject and US$2 for the charity, or US$15 and US$5, respectively, and the subject...
12. Testing competing models of loss aversion: an adversarial collaboration
Pages 1561-1580
Bateman, Ian, Kahneman, Daniel, Munro, Alistair, Starmer, Chris and Sugden, Robert
This paper reports an ‘adversarial collaboration’—a project carried out by two individuals or research groups who, having proposed conflicting hypotheses, seek to resolve their dispute. It describes an experiment which investigates whether, when individuals consider giving up money in exchange for goods, they construe money outlays as losses or as foregone gains. This issue bears on the explanation of the widely observed disparity between willingness-to-pay...
13. VCM or PPM? A comparison of the performance of two voluntary public goods mechanisms
Pages 1581-1592
Rondeau, Daniel, Poe, Gregory L. and Schulze, William D.
Little progress has been made toward understanding the relative performance of the two mechanisms most widely used for fundraising: the Voluntary Contribution (VCM) and Provision Point (PPM) mechanisms. This paper provides direct comparisons of the relative performance of variants of the VCM and PPM as they are most commonly implemented in the field. The research makes use of 1296 individual observations from 721 subjects, including 40 observations from a...
