The dynamics of cooperation in asymmetric public goods games.

ABSTRACT: When people collaborate in groups, they routinely face collective action problems: for the group effort to succeed, individuals need to cooperate despite any incentives to defect. These problems can be modeled with public goods games. To facilitate such an analysis, many studies assume the game is symmetric. Group members have the same means to cooperate (equal endowments), and contributions of different group members are equally effective (equal productivities). Studies that allow for some inequality tend to focus on one kind of inequality only. In practice, however, people can be unequal in many ways. The effect of these inequalities may in turn depend on the specific public goods game considered. To explore these issues, we combine a large-sample experiment with extensive theoretical wo

SUBMITTER: Wang X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12867639 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature