title: Stimulating Contributions to Public Goods through Information Feedback: Some Experimental Results.
abstract: In traditional public good experiments participants receive an endowment from the experimenter that can be invested in a public good or kept in a private account. In this paper we present an experimental environment where participants can invest time during five days to contribute to a public good. Participants can make contributions to a linear public good by logging into a web application and performing virtual actions. We compared four treatments, with different group sizes and information of (relative) performance of other groups. We find that information feedback about performance of other groups has a small positive effect if we control for various attributes of the groups. Moreover, we find a significant effect of the contributions of others in the group in the previous day on the number of points earned in the current day. Our results confirm that people participate more when participants in their group participate more, and are influenced by information about the relative performance of other groups.
authors.affiliation: School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, United States of America.|Center for Behavior, Institutions and the Environment, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, United States of America.
authors.forename: Marco A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Janssen
authors.affiliation: Center for Behavior, Institutions and the Environment, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, United States of America.
authors.forename: Allen
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, United States of America.
authors.forename: Hari
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Sundaram
mesh_terms: D000068156:Formative Feedback; D006801:Humans; D015233:Models, Statistical; D060756:Social Networking