March 2013

IZA DP No. 7307: Contribution Games and the End-Game Effect: When Things Get Real – An Experimental Analysis

Ronen Bar-El, Yossef Tobol

published as 'Fundraising to a real-life public good – evidence from the laboratory' in: Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2016, 65, 27-37 (with Yuval Arbel)

We conduct a contribution game for a real public good and show that when the contributors value the real public good highly, they increase their contributions in each round. Thus, contrary to previous literature, free riding decreases over rounds and the end-game effect is reversed.