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Category: Project

Description: Climate change is one of the greatest challenges that humankind has ever faced. The main difficulty is to coordinate an international action, where countries are also competitors in the global economy. The dramatic change in living conditions calls for immediate action, however, solving the problem necessitates common action from all countries. This puts us in a so-called social dilemma (Milinski et al., 2008). The temptation of not investing enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions makes climate change negotiations a good example of a common pool resource dilemma. In such dilemmas a community has a pool of common goods (reduced CO2 emission), created by the contributions of group members, which is freely accessible by all the individual group members (Fennewald T J, Kievit-Kylar B, 2012). Altruistic and fair-share acts render the common aim reachable, but free riders benefit more by investing less or nothing. This collective action problem affects all players, regardless of how much they took from the common goods. Threshold public goods games (PGG) are often used for studying social dilemmas corresponding to climate change. In these games participants form a group of k persons and play an n-round game. Before the first round, each participant receives a private endowment, from which they can contribute to the common fund in each round. Throughout the game, players are perfectly informed about the past and present contributions of their group members, including themselves. If the amount of money in the common fund reaches a given threshold by the end of the game (by the n-th round), players take home all their remaining money, which they did not contribute. If the target is not reached, then every player loses all their money with a given chance (or they lose a given share of their money with certainty), regardless of their previous contributions to the public fund. Using this game as a framework, Milinski et al. (2008) studied the effect of varying the risk of losing the money in case of not reaching the target investment. They have shown that the higher the risk of losing the money, the higher the level of cooperation within the group. Further effects, such as the heterogeneity in wealth (Milinski et al., 2011), the size of the group (Pacheco et al., 2014), the information transfer between players, or even verbal commitment (Tavoni et al. 2011) have been investigated in different studies (Tavoni et al. 2011, Dannenberg et al. 2015). Competition has also been explored. To generate competition, authors expanded the game either with introducing a trust game (indirect reciprocity game) after the PGG to create a competitive reputation condition (Barclay et al, 2004, 2007); or integrating a “tug-of-war” in the PGG, where players can extract money from each other (Barker et al, 2013). Naturally, real situations differ from experimental ones in many respects, most of which are not studied yet. In the preregistered study we are interested in: 1) how pronounced competition among group members modifies the willingness to contribute to the cooperative effort and 2) whether earning the endowment modifies the subjects’ contribution strategy or not.