Event Details

Economics Research Semianr

The relationship between contributions to public goods and their returns is often risky: consider corruption or inefficiencies in governments, or areas where our knowledge is limited such as climate change mitigation. Rational individuals may change their contributions to respond to this risk, but risk could also be used as an excuse. In non-strategic settings, it has been found that when the link between one’s actions and their consequences on other people is weakened by risk, people get plausible deniability to behave less prosocially without incurring a cost in terms of worsened image, as the selfish behaviour can be attributed to back luck rather than their selfishness (e.g., Dana, Weber & Kuang, 2007; Grossman & van der Weele, 2017). We test whether people exploit uncertainty in public good games (PGG) by using it as an excuse to freeride. We administered five between-subjects treatments (including a baseline PGG). Across treatments, we varied whether the marginal per capita returns (MPCR) were certain or uncertain, and whether this uncertainty could give participants plausible deniability about their low contributions. We found no change in free-riding or average contributions across treatments, suggesting that cooperation under uncertainty is accurately captured by the standard PGGs with certain MPCR, and that uncertainty is not a barrier to cooperation in PGG settings.