Conditional cooperation and disclosure in developing countries

Abstract

Understanding the motivations behind people’s voluntary contributions to public goods is crucial for the broader issues of economic and social development. By using the experimental design of Fischbacher, Gächter, and Fehr (2001), we investigate the distribution of contribution types in two developing countries with very high collectivism rating – Colombia and Vietnam – and compare our findings with those previously found in developed countries. We also investigate the effect of introducing disclosure of contribution on the distribution of contribution types and on the contribution itself. Overall, our experiments show that the distribution of contribution types remains unaffected by the disclosure of contributions and, on average, is similar both in the two countries and when compared with previous findings with the exception of proportion of free-riders.