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This paper replicates four highly cited, classic lab experimental studies in the provision of public goods. The studies consider the impact of marginal per capita return and group size; framing (as donating to or taking from the public good); the role of confusion in the public goods game; and the effectiveness of peer punishment. Considerable attention has focused recently on the problem of publication bias, selective reporting, and the importance of research transparency in social sciences. Replication is at the core of any scientific process and replication studies offer an opportunity to reevaluate, confirm or falsify previous findings. This paper illustrates the value of replication in experimental economics. The experiments were conducted as class projects for a PhD course in experimental economics, and follow exact instructions from the original studies and current standard protocols for lab experiments in economics. Most results show the same pattern as the original studies, but in all cases with smaller treatment effects and lower statistical significance, sometimes falling below accepted levels of significance. In addition, we document a “Texas effect,” with subjects consistently exhibiting higher levels of contributions and lower free-riding than in the original studies. This research offers new evidence on the attenuation effect in replications, well documented in other disciplines and from which experimental economics is not immune. It also opens the discussion over the influence of unobserved heterogeneity in institutional environments and subject pools that can affect lab results.

Unauthorised file sharing (UFS) in online communities (OCs) is a major intellectual property concern. Researchers have traditionally viewed UFS as digital piracy and have suggested that deterrents, such as legal actions, should be in place. However, previous research has not considered the OC context and cannot explain why OC members share unauthorised files even when there is legislation against this in place. In OCs, UFS exhibits features of public goods contribution. Therefore, the authors claim that public goods contribution motivations can provide a compelling explanation for UFS in OCs.

The authors propose a theoretical model in which two egoistic public goods contribution motivations (namely, warm-glow giving and demand for resources) are tested alongside motivations informed by the sanctions described by deterrence theory, a theory widely used within the digital piracy perspective.

The authors find that warm glow and demand for resources are positively related to UFS in OCs; the effect of warm glow is moderated by users' attachment to OCs. Importantly, the results suggest that although sanctions significantly predict UFS, the effect of sanctions on UFS becomes insignificant in the presence of warm glow, demand for resources and attachment.

The study offers new insights into why users engage in UFS and highlights that public goods contribution should be taken into account in developing anti-piracy policies and practices.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on conditional cooperation and investigate whether the difference in contributions between Partners and Strangers designs in linear public goods experiments can be explained by differences in beliefs.

The author conducted linear public goods experiments by using Partners and Strangers designs with belief eliciting their group member’s contributions.

The author shows that the difference in the magnitude of the responsiveness of contribution to belief (i.e. the marginal contribution to belief) creates different contribution levels in Partners and Strangers designs.

The presented results imply that having a strategic motive increases contributions by increasing the magnitude of the responsiveness of contribution to belief rather than by raising belief level.

The main claim of this paper is that “marginal contribution to belief” rather than “belief level” causes the difference in contribution levels between Partners and Strangers. This is the first proven evidence of a difference in belief between Partners and Strangers.

The aim of this study is to provide a theoretical extension to the private‐collective model of information sharing along with an empirical test with users of a social bookmarking website.

The paper includes a survey of 112 users of an actual bookmarking site recruited through an online research panel firm. The survey consisted of scales adapted from the literature as well as scales developed by the authors.

The results indicate that contributions to a social bookmarking site are a combination of intentional and unintentional contributions. A significant predictor of intentional public contributions of bookmarks is an egoistic motivation to see one as competent by contributing valuable information. However, there is also a significant but negative relationship between altruism and public contribution whereby users concerned with the needs of others limit their public contributions.

The sample consists of users of a particular social bookmarking site (Yahoo!'s MyWeb). Therefore, the results may not be generalizable to other social bookmarking websites, different types of social networks, or other contexts lacking the public/private option for contributions. Second, since the data comes from a cross‐sectional survey, as opposed to a longitudinal study, the causal relations posited in the model and substantiated with the statistical analyses can only be inferred based on the authors’ theoretical development. Third, although the size of the sample (112 respondents) is appropriate for PLS analysis it may have been insufficient to detect other significant relationships.

Administrators of social bookmarking sites should incorporate incentive and feedback mechanisms to inform contributors whether they contributions have been used (for example, with times viewed) and/or deemed useful (with numeric or qualitative ratings).

The results suggest that both selfish motivations associated with the need to feel competent (egoism), as well as selfless concerns for the needs of other users (altruism) drive intentional contributions to the public repository in social bookmarking systems. These two counterbalancing forces indicate that a mix of egoism and altruism is crucial for the long‐term sustainability of social web sites based on information sharing.

This study provides theoretical explanations and empirical evidence of egoism and altruism as significant explanations for cooperation in private‐collective models, such as the ones represented by social bookmarking systems.

The Balinese have been successful for centuries in sustaining cooperation among the members of local communities in order to provide public goods through individual contributions. The purpose of this paper is to review and highlight the Balinese mechanism's remarkable features.

The paper surveyed the experimental literature on public goods and highlighted those features of the Balinese tradition that have been proven to be both effective in the experimental laboratory and successful in deterring free‐riding on the field.

The most prominent features discussed are decentralization, democratic decision making, the use of two currencies, supervision, and the possibility of imposing severe sanctions for free‐riding.

The paper's findings not only can help to preserve the high level of cooperation among inhabitants in Bali threatened by migration flows and the increasingly intense reliance on the market mechanism, but they also provide general insights both for theoreticians and practitioners on how to create successful communities. In addition, the literature review sheds light on several features of public‐good games that have not been satisfactorily explored yet by experimental economists.

The novelty of the paper's approach lies in looking at the Balinese tradition through the glasses of mechanism design theory and aligning the related findings of experimental economics in order to understand its success and problems.

We suggest that globalization, a process that fosters greater interdependence and mutual awareness among actors around the world in their economic, political, social, and cultural interactions, will also decrease the social distance among them and thus increase individuals' propensities to cooperate with distal others. We demonstrate in a multi-country public goods experiment that among the four domains of individual participation in globalization, economic participation in globalization has the least effect in prompting cooperation. Conversely, the other three domains of globalization have strong effects on individual cooperation, and this is robust to different specifications of the econometric model.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the commonly used policy approach to subsidize the private provision of public goods by granting agents deductions with respect to their income or corporate tax burden.

In the framework of a microeconomic representative agent model the commonly used policy approach to subsidize donations by granting agents deductions with respect to their income tax burden is examined. The paper especially considers that most income tax schemes are progressive and deductibility is limited. After pointing to the problems arising from these specific properties of tax‐refund schemes the paper turns towards the effects that such a tax‐refund scheme has with respect to donations on the one hand and welfare on the other hand.

Findings shows that the effects of the commonly practiced methods of supporting donations depend crucially on the specific properties of the tax scheme and preferences of agents. While Pareto‐improvements and even Pareto‐efficiency can result from the implementation of such a scheme, it is also conceivable that some agents perceive a utility reduction.

The analysis builds on a static approach although taxation also exerts important dynamic effects. These effects have been neglected in the current paper as the interaction of taxation and preferences is already quite complex. However, they should be considered in future research.

Owing to the dependency of welfare effects on the tariff structure, income tax reforms as they are planned in many countries might not only induce a reduction in donations, but might as a result also alter the induced welfare effects.

The paper shows that the generally applied tax‐refund schemes constitute no effective means to induce optimal donation levels. Implications depend crucially on, e.g. deductibility ceilings and progressiveness of tax rates.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of transfers as a means to overcome inefficiencies in the provision of impure public goods. The paper employs the example of international conditional transfers targeted to overcome suboptimal low climate protection efforts by influencing the abatement technology choice of countries.

The paper applies the Lancastrian characteristics approach and conduct numerical simulations for divergent degrees of substitutability between different characteristics. The paper takes into account climate‐protection benefits (global pollution reduction) as well as co‐benefits (local pollution reduction) of climate protection activities.

The analysis shows that individual country solution can be improved upon by making transfers from the richer countries to the poorer ones, if the latter have a lower relative preference for the global public goods (global pollution reduction) than the former. The magnitudes of such transfers will depend on the relative benefits of the global and local pollutants in the two countries. The authors also investigated the dependency of the potential for transfers on the degree of complementarity between global and local pollution characteristics. With a “Cobb Douglas” type of function used here the elasticity of substitution between the two is of course one. With a zero degree of substitutability the adjustment to a lower level of the global public good in fact starts to happen at a lower per capita income level. The scope for conditional transfers is still there, although the gains can be slightly smaller than when adjustment on the “global pollution characteristic – local pollution characteristic” margin is possible.

This paper is a contribution to the literature on impure public goods. In particular, the authors examine the role of international transfers in obtaining an efficient global allocation of resources in the presence of such public goods. To date the analysis of impure public goods has not examined the case of a continuum of technologies where an efficient solution requires conditional transfers, i.e. payments from one country to another to undertake a different supply of global and local public goods than the second country would wish to undertake.

We develop elements of Network Exchange and Expectation States Theories to explain the relationship between power and status. While power and status are highly correlated, demonstrating that power can be used to attain high status has proven difficult, perhaps because negative reactions to power use limit power users’ influence. We propose three ways to reduce negative reactions to power use. One of them, philanthropy, suggests a solution to the “free-rider” problem in collective action. If philanthropic contributions increase status, then contributing to a public good may also. Thus, status attainment may be an incentive motivating public goods contributions.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to serve as an introduction and motivation for Volume 13 of Research in Experimental Economics. In many cases, these introductory chapters are prefaces, limited to giving a roadmap of the volume and brief discussions of the chapters and why they were included. However, in some cases a more extensive discussion of the state of the literature and discipline can be useful. We have the same goal for this chapter.

Methodology – The methodology is that of a literature review combined with an analysis of the development of issues of endogeneity, self-selection, and formation in laboratory experimental research on public goods, charitable contributions, and nonprofit organizations.

Findings – This chapter traces the path of experimental public goods research as viewed through several lenses. There is a correspondence between the period of carefully controlled conditions in laboratory research and the framework of neoclassical economic theory (Lindahl/Samuelson). Indeed this is one of the original purposes of the earliest experiments by economists. However, there has been a distinct shift away from external control towards more endogenous evolution and selection over the past decade.

Originality – There have been several surveys of public goods research (many are referenced in this chapter). To our knowledge, this is the first to set out the history of, and the imperatives for, this new direction.