Simultaneous versus Sequential Public Good Provision and the Role of Refunds - An Experimental StudyJournal of Public EconomicsCoats, J. C. and Grosskopf, B.
2008
Authors from the College of Business:
Coats, Jennifer
We experimentally study contributing behavior to a threshold public good under simultaneous and sequential voluntary contribution mechanisms and investigate how refund policies interact with the mechanism. We find that, for a given refund rule, efficiency is greater under a sequential contribution mechanism than under a simultaneous contribution mechanism. Furthermore, for a given order of contributions, we find that full refund unambiguously achieves higher efficiency in the simultaneous mechanism while this is not the case in the sequential mechanism.