Assortative matching group formations and group representatives in a repeated public goods game

ABSTRACT

We study the role of group representatives cooperating under different assortative matching groups in a repeated public goods game. We find that the requested contribution proposals are an essential motivation factor for the individuals’ contribution. At the same time, cooperation is more likely to be strengthened by the role of the group representatives.

KEYWORDS:

• Public goods game
• assortative matching
• group representatives
• collective decision-making

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C72
• C92
• D70

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 71203046; the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 71773024. I would like to thank Prof. Daniel Friedman, Prof. Songsong Li and anonymous referees for constructive and very useful comments, and Michelle O. and Annabel for language editing. We are grateful to the LEEPS lab and Experimental Economics Workshop in UCSC.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The NMI and NMR treatments with random matching are as control.

² We describe the data for the second 15 rounds in another paper (in preparation) and did not analyse them here.

³ We use the seemingly unrelated estimation used by Chaudhuri et al. (2017).

⁴ Using ‘$Private$’(return from private account) and ‘$Public$’(return from group account) as predictors used in previous experiments, e.g. Gunnthorsdottir et al. (2010); Cabrera et al. (2013).

⁵ The $low$ constant is significantly different from the $high$ and $mid$ (each with ${\chi }^2\left(1\right)\ge 7.32$; $p\le 0.0007$).

⁶ The difference between $low$ and $high$ (${\chi }^2\left(1\right)=0.30$; $p=0.5831$), and between $low$ and $mid$ (${\chi }^2\left(1\right)=2.31$; $p=0.1284$) are not significant.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [71203046,71773024]; Natural Science Foundation of Heilongjiang Province [G2018006].