IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecm/nawm04/402.html

Giving Little by Little: Dynamic Voluntary Contribution Games

Author

Listed:
  • Lise Vesterlund
  • John Duffy
  • Jack Ochs

Abstract

Shelling (1960) among others have argued that contributions to public goods may be larger if people spread their contributions and give one small contribution at a time. Examining a threshold public good environment, Marx and Matthews (2000) show that multiple rounds may secure a provision level that cannot be achieved when only one round of contributions is available. Interestingly, sequential contributions both increase the benefit of giving and the cost of free riding. In some environments, zero provision is the unique equilibrium of the one-round contribution game, whereas there are equilibria that reach the threshold in the multiple-round game. We study such an environment experimentally. While initially contributions appear to respond to the possibility of making multiple small contributions, this difference diminishes very quickly. Overall there is little evidence that contributions are larger when individuals slowly can contribute to the public good.

Suggested Citation

  • Lise Vesterlund & John Duffy & Jack Ochs, 2004. "Giving Little by Little: Dynamic Voluntary Contribution Games," Econometric Society 2004 North American Winter Meetings 402, Econometric Society.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecm:nawm04:402
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • L3 - Industrial Organization - - Nonprofit Organizations and Public Enterprise

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecm:nawm04:402. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christopher F. Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/essssea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.