Voluntary Participation and Spite in Public Good Provision Experiments: An International Comparison
通过美国和日本的实验室实验，研究自愿参与非排他性公共品供给时的行为差异，发现美国数据符合进化稳定策略纳什均衡，而日本被试早期更易表现出恶意行为，但最终提高了公共品供给效率。
Abstract This paper studies voluntary public good provision in the laboratory, in a cross-cultural experiment conducted in the United States and Japan. Our environment differs from the standard voluntary contribution mechanism because subjects first decide whether or not to participate in providing this non-excludable public good. This participation decision is conveyed to the other subject prior to the subjects’ contribution decisions. We find that only the American data are consistent with the evolutionary-stable-strategy Nash equilibrium predictions, and that behavior is significantly different across countries. Japanese subjects are more likely to act spitefully in the early periods of the experiment, even though our design changes subject pairings each period so that no two subjects ever interact twice. Surprisingly, this spiteful behavior eventually leads to more efficient public good contributions for Japanese subjects than for American subjects.