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Category: Project

Description: The long tradition of research on cooperation includes a well-established finding that individuals respond to the degree of conflict between self and collective interests (that is, the relative benefits from cooperation) in providing public goods. Existing empirical evidence builds upon settings where participants make multiple decisions or where they can strategically consider alternative scenarios. Here, we consider settings where people find themselves in one-time cooperative encounters, such as they do in volunteering or donating to immediate needs for crisis relief. For these distinct and highly relevant settings, we report a lack of responsiveness to increases in cooperation benefits, thereby highlighting the limits to our understanding of the determinants of one-time cooperation encounters. Across two studies, 2232 individuals participate in treatments where we vary across participants the relative benefit from contributing to a public good (that is, the marginal per capita return, the MPCR). We consider a change in the endowment to hold efficiency constant, changes in the participant pool (UK general population vs. students), in the physical distance between participants (online vs in the laboratory), and more complex settings considering group-to-group interactions with providers and donors to public goods. Throughout, neither average contribution levels, nor the distribution of contributions are significantly affected by the increases in contribution incentives. The mechanism behind these results can be explained by the close correlation between expectations of other people’s cooperative behavior and own cooperation, and the fact that these expectations of others’ do not increase with higher benefits from cooperation.