The Boundaries of Reward Mechanism: In Provision of Public Goods Game

In this paper, we investigate an extended public goods game of two stages with opportunities to reward other group members at different costs to examine whether the opportunities to reward at lower costs would motivate more cooperation in a one-shot situation. This study shows that the opportunities to reward at lower costs fail to increase the group account allocations or improve the group efficiency. However, the subjects who contribute more tokens to the group account receive more reward tokens when their contribution levels are higher than the group average.