The Role of Non-Monetary and Strategic Considerations in the Public Good Games

The goal of the paper is to test the importance of such factors as fairness, reciprocation and altruism in subjects' reasoning. I consider the phantom treatment where subjects are randomly matched with the decisions that were made in the (separate) benchmark treatment, and two-type treatments where one type of subjects gets fixed payment regardless of the outcome, and the second type has a standard payoff function, with only the opponent's type being known. The main result is that removal of non-monetary and strategic considerations decrease the average over-contribution only by 40%, which means that these considerations are not the main cause of subjects' suboptimal behavior in the benchmark