Description:
This chapter discusses the cooperation in voluntary contributions mechanism (VCM) experiments. The chapter presents various experiments using a new method for collecting data from voluntary contributions mechanism environments. The main virtue of the design is that it makes it possible to collect a very rich set of data. The results presented in this chapter are inconsistent with the hypothesis that contributions are made only by mistake and with simple linear altruism and warm glow models. The type of motivation that our evidence favors is one involving some kind of reciprocal altruism. The idea for this design comes from two rather elementary insights. First, richer data may be the key to understanding subjects' behavior more fully. Second, in previous VCM experiments, any subject's decision in any single period has always been for one, given, value of the marginal rate of substitution (MRS) between a public and a private good. For different values of the MRS, subjects' motivations and choices may vary. Hence, one might prefer to obtain information about individual choices for a variety of MRS values.