Privately Provided Public Goods: Theoretical, Econometric and Experimental Studies of Cooperation

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Millions of people contribute money or volunteer time to charitable organizations, and the levels and frequency of these donations far exceed what could be predicted by standard economic models. Such cooperation is also seen in laboratory experiments. Many scholars have explored cooperation with the prisoner's dilemma, and over recent years, there have been many experiments on the private provision of public goods. The general results of these experiments is that subjects cooperate well in excess of that predicted by theory. This project carries out experimental, theoretical and econometric research on cooperative behavior. The results are important because they could lead to a better understanding of why people cooperate and how to encourage cooperation. For example, cooperation is an important element in human adaption to global environmental change. Four major experimental projects are conducted to determine how much of the cooperative behavior observed in experiments can be attributed to things other than altruism or warm-glow. There are four major econometric projects. The first looks at both the Survey of Consumer Finance and the Independent Sector survey on gifts and time. By combining the strengths of these two surveys, the project provides the first detailed study of the interdependence of volunteerism and charitable giving. Three other projects examine the data from the 1989 Current Population Survey to study household decisions on labor force status, hours of work, and volunteerism. This project explores the puzzle of why American corporations contribute almost 2% of pretax profits to charity. Currently there are almost no studies of corporate philanthropy in the economics literature. Another project addresses the "fund raising puzzle," which is that charitable organizations rely heavily on "leadership gifts" in fund raising campaign. A new model is developed of how personal charitable contributions can be influenced by peer pressure or "social comparisons."