Many people contribute to public goods but stop doing so once they experience free riding.We test the hypothesis that groups whose members know that they are composed only of "likeminded" cooperators are able to maintain a higher cooperation level than the most cooperative, randomly composed groups. Our experiments confirm this hypothesis. We also predict that groups of "like-minded" free riders do not cooperate. Yet, we find a high level of strategic cooperation that eventually col-lapses. Our results underscore the importance of group composition and social learning by heterogeneously motivated agents to understand the dynamics of cooperation and free riding
We report survey and experimental evidence on trust and voluntary cooperation from more than 630 non-student and student participants in rural and urban Russia. Our subjects have a diverse socioeconomic background that we relate to the answers of a survey on trust attitudes and to contribution behavior in a one-shot public goods game. We find that the socio-economic background affects trust attitudes, but we find no separate influence of socio-economic variables on cooperative behavior in a one-shot public goods experiment. However, cooperation is significantly positively correlated to trust toward strangers and beliefs about the fairness and helpfulness of others
We argue that the lack of large cross-cultural differences in many games with student subjects from developed countries may be due to the games studied. These games tap primarily basic psychological reactions, like fairness, and reciprocity. Once we look at norm-enforcement, in particular punishment, we find large differences even among culturally rather homogeneous student groups from developed countries
