When Identifying Contributors is Costly: An Experiment on Public Goods

• Autores: Anya Samek, Roman M. Sheremeta
• Localización: Southern Economic Journal, ISSN 0038-4038, ISSN-e 2325-8012, Vol. 82, Nº. 3, 2016, págs. 801-808
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Studies show that identifying contributors increases contributions to public goods. In practice, viewing identifiable information is costly, which may discourage people from accessing it. We design a public goods experiment in which participants can pay to view information about identities and contributions of group members. We compare this to a treatment in which there is no identifiable information, and a treatment in which all contributors are identified. Our main findings are that: (i) contributions in the treatment with costly information are as high as those in the treatment with free information, (ii) participants rarely choose to view the information, and (iii) being a high contributor is correlated with choosing to view information about others.