Cooperation across payoff equivalent public good and common pool resource experiments

• Cooperation is often greater in public good experiments than in common pool resource experiments.
• Results suggest that this cooperation divergence stems from variation in experimental parameters across experiments.
• Understanding behavior in public good and common pool resource experiments is important for the design of institutions meant to solve market failures.

Subjects in public good experiments are often observed to be more cooperative than subjects in common pool resource experiments. This cooperation divergence may be explained by a behavioral asymmetry between the warm-glow of doing something good and the cold-prickle of doing something bad (Andreoni, 1995). However, recent research suggests that behavior is qualitatively similar across payoff equivalent public good and common pool resource experiments (Apesteguia & Maier-Rigaud, 2006). This paper reports on an experiment designed to test the robustness of the cooperation divergence. The analysis quantifies the cooperation across payoff equivalent public good and common pool resource experiments that explicitly inform subjects how their allocation decisions effect group earnings. Results suggest that the level of cooperation is equivalent across treatments. This research suggests that the observed cooperation divergence is caused, in part, by variation in the experimental parameters employed rather than from a behavioral regularity unexplained by standard theory.