The Influence Of Cooperation Behavior In Repeated N-Person Public Goods Experiments

This paper examines the public goods dilemma in which personal benefit's maximization will result public benefit non-maximization. Since some scholars proposed that consistent contributions can improve the public cooperation level, this paper has implemented the following two experimental researches following this idea and giving a deeper investigation with the public goods dilemma model.First the paper has tested the effectiveness of the consistent cooperation strategy on raising the group cooperation level in public goods dilemma. The research has divided the objectives into consistent absolute cooperators and consistent comparative cooperators according to the investment to the public goods in the experiments. Consistent absolute cooperators are the objectives who invest all their available resources to the public goods and consistent comparative cooperators are the objectives who invest the most in their group to the public goods.Main conclusions are: Consistent absolute cooperators significantly raised the public cooperation level while consistent comparative cooperators significantly reduced the public cooperation level; neither the consistent absolute cooperators nor the consistent comparative cooperators can reach the same benefit level as other general participants or in the no cooperation conditions while consistent absolute cooperators get more than consistent comparative cooperators do; in the repeated public goods experiments, the cooperation level in the first round has significantly correlation to the cooperation of whole experiments and neither consistent absolute cooperators nor consistent comparative cooperators can raise the cooperation level in the last round experiment while consistent absolute cooperators significantly affect the group cooperation in the early stage of the experiments.All these experimental conclusions show that not all cooperators can raise the public cooperation and consistent cooperation strategy has no profitable advantages. The most probable reason for the unsuccessful of cooperation strategy in the N-person repeated public goods dilemma is that more participants weaken the cooperation strategy's power of attractiveness and influence. To research the participants' preference on giving their attention to the other participants' cooperation behavior and improve the consistent cooperation strategy further, the second experimental research has been implemented.The second experiment researched the participants' preference of paying attention to cooperators or free riders through the design of allowing the participants to choose being informed of highest or lowest public goods investment value (called reference information) in the group after each round experiment. Whether the reference preference will be changed in different stages of the experiment has also been investigated. Further the influence of cooperators' investment on public goods to the other participants' investment decision has also been analyzed and the paper investigated the participants' behavioral characters, constituted the decision model.Main conclusions are: in the N-person repeated public goods experiment, if the participants can choose to be informed of the other group members' highest or lowerst investment to the public goods, more of them will generally choose to be informed of the highest investment. Although the preference of participants' choosing on the reference information has no strong correlation with their investment to the public goods in the experiments, the variation of the participants' investment on public goods in different rounds is correlated to the reference volume. At the same time, the variation of participants' investment on the public goods is also correlated to the group average investment volume, the difference between participants' investment and the reference volume and the difference between participants' investment and the group average investment. The paper has implemented regression analysis with these factors and constituted the decision model in this kind of experiment design. In the second experiment we also find that in this kind of experiment design, participants' investment on public goods is significantly higher than in complete information structure experiments.Finally this paper proposed four cooperation recommendations to the repeated N-person public goods dilemma according to the conclusions of two former experimental researches. First, consistent absolutely cooperative strategy is more effective than cnsistent comparatively cooperative strategy. Second, if the group's cooperation level is still low or begin to fall down in the later rounds, person who consistent adopts absolutely cooperative strategy could give up this strategy for avoiding lost. Third in the first round of the public goodscooperation people is better to adopt the cooperative strategy not wait for see. Fourth, in the public goods delimma, it is unnecessary to public every participants' behavioral information, because complete information may bring negative effects to the cooperation.