Social value orientation and conditional cooperation in the online one-shot public goods game

We report two studies on the role of altruism and reciprocity in the online one-shot Public Goods Game (PGG). In study 1 we run an experiment to see whether the disposition to donate (altruistic/prosocial disposition according to the Social Value Orientation scale (SVO), Murphy et al., 2011) and the disposition to reciprocate (disposition to be a conditional cooperator measured with the strategy method (dCC), Fischbacher et al., 2012) explain contribution in the PGG. In study 2 we run a similar experiment where we add the manipulation of cognition by means of two treatments: time pressure (to induce less deliberative decisions) and motivated delay (to induce more deliberative decisions). Overall, we find that: (i) a higher SVO score goes with higher contributions; (ii) higher beliefs go with higher contributions; (iii) dCC does not appreciably account for contributions; (iv) conditional contributions elicited with the strategy method predict actual contribution for the stated belief; (v) while (i)–(iv) are unaffected by treatments, contributions under motivated delay are about 10% higher than under time pressure. Our experimental evidence suggests that altruism, beliefs and predicted contributions account for contributions regardless of the extent of deliberation, which however seems to impact positively and independently contributions.