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Birth, death and public good provision

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

John Duffy  and
Jonathan Lafky
John Duffy*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA
Jonathan Lafky*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Lafayette College, Easton, PA 18042, USA
*
[email protected]
[email protected]
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Abstract

We explore the effect of fixed versus dynamic group membership on public good provision. In a novel experimental design, we modify the traditional voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM) by periodically replacing old members of a group with new members over time. Under this dynamic, overlapping generations matching protocol we find that average contributions experience significantly less decay over time relative to a traditional VCM environment with fixed group membership and a common termination date. These findings suggest that the traditional pattern of contribution and decay seen in many public goods experiments may not accurately reflect behavior in groups with changing membership, as is the case in many real-world environments.

Keywords

Public goodsOverlapping generationsVoluntary contribution mechanismExperimental economicsC72C92D64H41
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 317 - 341
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-015-9439-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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