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Communication and visibility in public goods provision. (English) Zbl 1415.91080

Summary: We design a public goods laboratory experiment in both a virtual world environment and an abstract computerized environment, each with and without communication and visibility, to investigate how communication and visibility of other participants affect individual contributions to public goods. In both environments, the presence of communication significantly and consistently improves public good contributions. However, the interaction between communication and visibility differs in the two environments. While the two dimensions are substitutes in the abstract computerized environment, they work in a complementary way to increase public goods contributions in the virtual world environment. Chat content analysis further shows that positive reinforcement and monitoring have a positive impact on cooperation, but dissent has a negative impact.

MSC:

91A90 Experimental studies
91B18 Public goods

Software:

ORSEE; Z-Tree; Stata
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Full Text: DOI

References:

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