Voluntary Contribution Mechanism Experiments at Brown

Experiments on voluntary contributions to a public good designed by Toby Page and Louis Putterman were carried out at Brown University (and a small set at the University of Rhode Island) between October, 1999 and October, 2003.  The experiments were funded by a Salomon Research Grant, a grant from the MacArthur Foundation norms and preferences network, a grant from the National Science Foundation, and supplemental funding from the Department of Economics. The following papers describing the results of these experiments have been published or accepted for publication:

Christopher Anderson and Louis Putterman, “Do Non-strategic Sanctions Obey the Law of Demand? The Demand for Punishment in the Voluntary Contribution Mechanism,” Games and Economic Behavior 54 (1): 1-24, 2006 (earlier version: Brown University Department of Economics Working Paper 2003-15). 

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Olivier Bochet, Talbot Page and Louis Putterman, forthcoming, “Communication and Punishment in Voluntary Contribution Experiments,” with Olivier Bochet and Talbot Page, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (earlier versions: Brown University Department of Economics Working Paper 2002-29 and Working Paper 2005-09) 60: 11-26, 2006.

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Olivier Bochet and Louis Putterman, “Not Just Babble: Opening the Black Box of Communication in a Voluntary Contribution Experiment," forthcoming, European Economic review.

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Matthias Cinyabuguma, Talbot Page and Louis Putterman,“Cooperation Under the Threat of Expulsion in a Public Goods Experiment,” Journal of Public Economics 89: 1421-35, 2005 (earlier version: Brown University Department of Economics Working Paper 2004-05).

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Talbot Page, Louis Putterman and Bulent Unel, “Voluntary Association in Public Goods Experiments: Reciprocity, Mimicry, and Efficiency,” Economic Journal 115: 1032-53,. 2005 (earlier version: Brown University Department of Economics Working Paper 2002-19).

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Umut Ones and Louis Putterman, “The Ecology of Collective Action: A Public Goods and Sanctions Experiment with Controlled Group Formation,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 62: 495-521, 2007 (earlier version: Brown University Department of Economics Working Paper 2004-01).

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Matthias Cinyabuguma, Talbot Page and Louis Putterman, “Can Second-Order Punishment Deter Perverse Punishment?” Experimental Economics 9: 265-79, 2006.

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The following working papers have been completed and are not yet published:

 

Arhan Ertan, Talbot Page and Louis Putterman, “Can Endogenously Chosen Institutions Mitigate the Free-Rider Problem and Reduce Perverse Punishment?”(Brown University Department of Economics Working Paper 2005-13).

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Talbot Page, Louis Putterman and Bruno Garcia, “Getting Punishment Right: Do Costly Monitoring and Redistribution Help?"

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