How Universal is Behavior? A Four Country Comparison of Spite and Cooperation in Voluntary Contribution Mechanisms

This paper studies behavior in experimentswith a linear voluntary contributionsmechanism for public goods conducted inJapan, the Netherlands, Spain and the U.S.A.The same experimental design was used inthe four countries. Our `contributionfunction' design allows us to obtain a viewof subjects' behavior from twocomplementary points of view. It yieldsinformation about situations where, inpurely pecuniary terms, it is a dominantstrategy to contribute all the endowmentand about situations where it is a dominantstrategy to contribute nothing. Our resultsshow, first, that differences in behavioracross countries are minor. We find thatwhen people play `the same game' theybehave similarly. Second, for all fourcountries our data are inconsistent withthe explanation that subjects contributeonly out of confusion. A common cooperativemotivation is needed to explain the data.