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

数以百万计的人向慈善组织捐款或志愿服务，这些捐款的水平和频率远远超过标准经济模型所能预测的。这种合作在实验室实验中也可以看到。许多学者探讨了囚徒困境下的合作，近年来，也有许多关于私人提供公共产品的实验。这些实验的一般结果是，受试者的合作程度超出了理论预测。本项目对合作行为进行了实验、理论和计量经济学研究。这些结果很重要，因为它们可以让我们更好地理解人们为什么合作以及如何鼓励合作。例如，合作是人类适应全球环境变化的一个重要因素。为了确定在实验中观察到的合作行为中有多少可以归因于利他主义或暖光之外的东西，进行了四个主要的实验项目。有四个主要的计量经济学项目。第一份报告着眼于消费者金融调查（Survey of Consumer Finance）和独立部门关于礼物和时间的调查。通过结合这两项调查的优势，该项目首次详细研究了志愿服务和慈善捐赠之间的相互依存关系。另外三个项目检查了1989年当前人口调查的数据，以研究家庭在劳动力状况、工作时间和志愿服务方面的决定。这个项目探讨了为什么美国公司将税前利润的近2%捐给慈善事业的难题。目前，经济学文献中几乎没有对企业慈善事业的研究。另一个项目解决了“筹款难题”，即慈善组织在筹款活动中严重依赖“领导礼物”。一个关于个人慈善捐款如何受到同伴压力或“社会比较”影响的新模型被开发出来。

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."