Meta-Analysis On Relationship Between Heterogeneity And Cooperation In Public-good Games

With regard to people's cooperative behavior,normative conflicts or unequal benefits was considered to influence cooperation level.Among the past studies,there has been hundreds of economic experiments which study on relationship between heterogeneity and cooperation level,however,they has not reached a consensus yet:heterogeneity improves cooperation,heterogeneity declines cooperation,and heterogeneity has no effect on cooperation.To solve the past contradiction,resorting to the method of system-evaluation,we apply Meta-analysis to the field of heterogeneity and cooperation for the very first time in this paper,by summarizing and analyzing relevant papers systematically,by methods of combining effect size and empirical analysis we find that heterogeneity could enhance cooperation level by 2.2 percent on average,reaching 12.8 percent at most,but this conclusion is not quite stable.Besides we find that two-dimension heterogeneity is able to improve the cooperation level dramatically by 25 percent on average,but the one-dimension heterogeneity doesn't produce this strong effect.In consideration of other symptoms of experiment,we find that no-communication condition or non-linear condition is more likely to improve the effect size,but communication condition or linear condition is more likely to lower the effect size.Moreover,there is quite big difference between different researchers,and the heterogeneous types could explain this difference at the greatest extent by 29.12%,this finding offers evidence for employing random-effect model.At last,by adopting publication-bias test and trim-and-fill method,we make predictions on future questions once we could bring more papers to our analysis pool:we are likely to conclude that heterogeneity may prevent increasing of cooperation level.To conclude,this paper employs Meta-analysis,one kind of new methods in this area,provides more compelling and creative empirical evidence for the past disputed topic,contributing more evidence to the argument that heterogeneity could enhance cooperation level,which is significant to resolve the controversy and lead the direction for the following research.