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Many public goods may be characterized as having multiple provision points. These goods are provided in discrete rather than continuous quantities and only if specified minimal levels of funding are attained. This chapter describes an experiment that examines allocations to a multiple provision point public good. Subjects determine the level of the good provided using a voluntary contribution mechanism. We vary the number of provision points (from one to five), leading to increasing degrees of separation between the social optimum and the Nash equilibria. In the final rounds of single-provision-point sessions, efficient outcomes are frequently observed In contrast, efficient outcomes are only rarely observed in multiple-threshold sessions. In our first treatment, a second provision point is added, resulting in a decrease in the Nash equilibrium and no change in the efficient outcome. Contributions fall relative to the single provision point sessions, but remain above the lower provision point. We then add a third higher, provision point that increases the group optimum contribution but leaves the Nash equilibria unchanged. Surprisingly, contributions decline even more sharply in this treatment and are often below the lowest threshold. In all of our treatments, however, efficiency gains over full free-riding are observed in many rounds.

Team social capital (TSC) has been attracting increasing research attention aiming to explore team effectiveness through within- and cross-team resource conduits. This study bridges two disconnected theories – TSC and evolutionary theory – to examine gaming clans and analyzes mechanisms of the clans' TSC building from an evolutionary perspective.

This research draws longitudinal data from a sample of gaming teams (N = 1,267) from anonymized player data from the game World of Tanks spanning 32 months. The authors explored teams' evolutionary patterns using hidden Markov models and applied longitudinal multilevel modeling to test hypotheses.

The results showed that teams of different sizes and levels of evolutionary fitness vary in team closure and bridging social capital. The authors also found that larger teams are more effective than smaller ones. The positive association between team-bridging social capital and effectiveness is more substantial for smaller teams.

This research advances the theoretical development of TSC by including the constructs of teams' evolutionary status when analyzing strategic social capital building. Adding to existing literature studying the outcome of TSC, this research also found a moderating effect of team size between TSC and effectiveness. Finally, this study also contributes to a longitudinal view of TSC and found significant evolutionary patterns of teams' membership, TSC, and effectiveness.