Identifiability of Individual Contributions in a Threshold Public Goods Experiment

This paper experimentally examines how information affects behavior in a threshold public goods game. Three treatments investigate how subjects react to varying amounts of information about the contribution behavior of other group members. Results suggest that revealing anonymous information about others' contributions leads to a significant decrease in contributions and an increase in the variance of contributions. In contrast, when individual contributions are identified by subject number, average contributions increase and the variance of contributions decreases significantly. Copyright 1998 Academic Press.