Trust, communication and equlibrium behaviour in public goods

This paper reports a novel cross-cultural public goods game experiment played in real time through Internet. Web-based software was used to compare the contributions to public good of different groups of participants: mixed, consisting of both Italians (students in law and economics) and Russians (students in economics), as well as all-Italian and all-Russian groups. This setup allows for testing for a number of effects, including participants’ awareness of the group composition in terms of nationality and gender of group members; possibility of coordination of one’s strategy during a cheap talk session organized before some of the games was used as an additional control. Our results show that the degree of cooperation is rather high, but does not vary significantly with nationalities of the group members, while communication tends to enhance contributions to public goods. A notable difference between the subjects representing the two nations is an overly strong and increasing cooperativeness of the Russian female participants in contrast to that of the Russian men, as well as the Italians.