TY - JOUR
T1 - Communication and punishment in voluntary contribution experiments
AU - Bochet, Olivier
AU - Page, Talbot
AU - Putterman, Louis
N1 - Funding Information:
The research reported here has been supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant SES-0001769) and the MacArthur Foundation Norms and Preferences Network. We thank George Athanassacopoulos, Mark Faktorovich, Chris Horn, Robert Letzler, John Mello, and Xiaotong Wang for their supporting roles on our research team. We thank Norman Frohlich, Joe Oppenheimer, Jeannette Brosig and Axel Ockenfels for helpful responses to inquiries, and Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter for kind encouragement.
PY - 2006/5
Y1 - 2006/5
N2 - We compare three forms of communication and punishment as incentives to increase contributions to public goods in laboratory experiments. We find, as in earlier experiments, that face-to-face communication has very strong effects, but surprisingly that verbal communication through a chat room preserving anonymity and excluding facial expression, etc. was almost as efficient. Numerical communication, via computer terminals, had no net effect on contributions or efficiency. Punishment, as in earlier experiments, increased contributions but because of its cost had little net effect on efficiency.
AB - We compare three forms of communication and punishment as incentives to increase contributions to public goods in laboratory experiments. We find, as in earlier experiments, that face-to-face communication has very strong effects, but surprisingly that verbal communication through a chat room preserving anonymity and excluding facial expression, etc. was almost as efficient. Numerical communication, via computer terminals, had no net effect on contributions or efficiency. Punishment, as in earlier experiments, increased contributions but because of its cost had little net effect on efficiency.
KW - Cheap talk
KW - Collective action
KW - Communication
KW - Public goods
KW - Punishment
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U2 - 10.1016/j.jebo.2003.06.006
DO - 10.1016/j.jebo.2003.06.006
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:33645859304
VL - 60
SP - 11
EP - 26
JO - Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
JF - Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
SN - 0167-2681
IS - 1
ER -