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| Edward Cartwright and Amrish Patel |
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| ''Imitation and the Incentive to Contribute early in a Sequential Public Good game
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| ( 2010, Vol. 12 No.4 ) |
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| Whether motivated by reciprocity or conformity, imitation is common in public good
contexts. We consider the incentive for an agent to contribute to a public good if he expects imitation from
others. Using a sequential public good game with exogenous ordering, we show that agents early enough
in the sequence who believe imitation to be sufficiently likely would want to contribute. By contributing,
they expect total contributions to increase significantly. We also show that preferences determine how
early an agent need be, that the observed share of imitators in experiments is sufficiently high to warrant
contribution and that an increase in group size reduces the incentive to contribute. |
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| Keywords: public goods, reciprocity, timing games |
JEL: H0 - Public Economics: General
D1 - Household Behavior: General |
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| Manuscript Received : Aug 05 2008 | | Manuscript Accepted : Mar 08 2012 |
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