Competition among public good providers for donor rewards

We present experimental evidence for decision settings where public good providers compete for endogenous rewards which are donations (transfers) offered by outside donors. Donors receive benefits from public good provision but cannot provide the good themselves. The performance of three competition mechanisms is examined in relation to the level of public good provision and transfers offered by donors. In addition to a contest where transfers received by public good providers are proportional to effort, we study two contests with exclusion from transfers, namely a winner-takes-all and a loser-gets-nothing. We compare behavior in these three decision settings to the default setting of no-contest (no-transfers). Results for this novel decision environment with endogenous transfers show that donors offer transfers (contest prizes) at similar levels across contests and contributions to the public good are not significantly different in the three contests settings, but are consistently and significantly higher in all contests compared to the setting with no-transfers. Initially, the winner-takes-all setting leads to a significantly higher increase in public good contributions compared to the other two contests; but this difference diminishes across decision rounds.

本研究提出了关于决策场景的实验证据，其中公共品提供者在内源性的奖励（即外部捐赠者的捐赠或转移）竞争。捐赠者虽能从公共品提供中获益，却无法直接提供公共品。本文探讨了三种竞争机制在公共品提供水平和捐赠者提供的转移量方面的表现。除了一个公共品提供者收到的转移与努力程度成比例的竞赛之外，我们还研究了两种排除转移的竞赛，即赢家通吃和输家无获。我们将这三种决策场景下的行为与无竞赛（无转移）的默认设置进行比较。针对这一新颖的具有内源性转移的决策环境的研究结果表明，在所有竞赛中，捐赠者提供的转移（竞赛奖品）水平相似，而向公共品的贡献在三种竞赛设置中并未显著不同，但相较于无转移的设置，所有竞赛中的贡献均保持一致且显著提高。最初，赢家通吃设置相较于其他两种竞赛，导致公共品贡献的显著增加；但随着决策轮次的推进，这种差异逐渐缩小。