Public goods provision via emails

Abstract

This study examines individual behaviors using three public goods games with different conditions, a pure public goods game, an introduction of an audience and a punishment condition, to investigate whether punishment would be more effective in eliciting a higher level of contribution and whether these games, lasting for a longer period of time, would exhibit different behavioral pattern than previous researches. We find out that punishment can significantly induce a higher level of contribution than the introduction of an audience. Moreover, the effect of social image resulted from an audience has vanished. Subjects’ contribu-tions under the treatment of an existence of audience converge to that of the pure public goods game. Over-all, our findings are different from previous research findings quite significantly.