The dictatorial public goods game

We propose a novel game, the Dictatorial Public Goods Game, to study the interplay between collective resource generation and centralized provision of public goods. After making choices in a standard Voluntary Contribution Mechanism (VCM), one player is selected from the group to administrate the contributions: either provide the public good or expropriate the collected resources for personal gain. We find that adding this centralized mechanism reduces efficiency compared to the standard VCM. Although higher contributions increase the material incentive to expropriate, they lead to more provision. Thus, pro-social choices in the contribution and in the provision stages act as complements, reflecting the generation of social capital in the group. Administrators tend to provide more when the statutory default is expropriation rather than provision. This counter status-quo effect is in line with the standard provision-maintenance gap in the literature, but is not explained by the theoretical arguments typically invoked to explain such framing effects.