Chapter 95 Participation Game Experiments: Explaining Voter Turnout

In the experiments, subjects were split in two groups of 6 individuals, named yellow and blue. Each subject had to decide whether or not to buy a token. The price of a token (i.e., the cost of participation) was common knowledge and equal for everyone. The number of tokens bought in each group determined the payoffs. The payoff was equal for everyone within a group. The earnings of a subject in a period equaled this payoff minus the cost of a token if one was bought by that subject. This was repeated for 20 periods. There were two payoff schedules, representing a winner-takes-all election (WIN) and proportional representation (PR). In WIN, each member of the group that bought the most tokens (won the elections) received a payoff of 2.50 Dutch Guilders and the payoff for the other group was zero. A tie was broken randomly with equal probability for both teams.