Voluntary Provision of Public Goods: The Multiple Unit Case

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a series of experiments designed to test the predictions of a model of voluntary provision of public goods through private contributions. The particular voluntary contribution game implements the core in successively undominated perfect equilibria, but the behavioral question is whether the agents adopt strategies which support this refinement to the Nash equilibrium. The experimental evidence suggests that they do not: core allocations do not consistently occur in the laboratory markets.