Full agreement and the provision of threshold publ

Authors: Federica Alberti Edward J Cartwright

Publish Date: 2016/03/01

Volume: 166, Issue: 1-2, Pages: 205-233

PDF Link

Abstract

The experimental evidence suggests that groups are inefficient at providing threshold public goods This inefficiency appears to reflect an inability to coordinate over how to distribute the cost of providing the good So why do groups not just split the cost equally We offer an answer to this question by demonstrating that in a standard threshold public good game there is no collectively rational recommendation We also demonstrate that if full agreement is required in order to provide the public good then there is a collectively rational recommendation namely to split the cost equally Requiring full agreement may therefore increase efficiency in providing threshold public goods We test this hypothesis experimentally and find support for itWe thank Robert Sugden for helpful and constructive comments on an earlier draft of the paper We also thank audiences at the PET12 conference in Taipei ESA conference in Cologne the University of Grenoble and Max Planck Institute of Economics We thank Kei Tsutsui for help with the computer programme for the experiment We also thanks the Editor and two anonymous referees for their constructive comments Federica Alberti is grateful to the Centre for Reasoning at the University of Kent for a postdoctoral fellowship that helped support the research reported in the paper

Keywords: