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Strategies and Pro-Social Tendencies in Incentive-Equivalent Public Goods Games and Binary Dilemmas

A number of experiments have examined whether individuals display consistent tendencies towards pro-social behaviour in different tasks and situations. The results have been mixed, with most studies showing only weak correlations in prosociality across tasks. However, many of these examples compare situations where the incentives and/or outcomes are not directly equivalent. We present an experiment where subjects both completed public goods games and made choices in binary strategic dilemmas. Several linear and non-linear incentive structures are presented to participants, and these structures are designed such that the outcomes for both self and other are directly equivalent in public goods and binary choice tasks. We find a significant relationship between pro-sociality in different tasks, but that this relationship is noisy, with subjects apparently applying different strategies in different tasks. Surprisingly, the correlation in pro-social behaviour is independent of the specific incentive structure, with cross-task behaviour being predicted equally well from responses in equivalent and non-equivalent incentive structures. Finally, by using novel incentive structures we show that individuals classified as “free riders” in traditional public goods games are actually comprised of two groups: “profit maximisers” and “non-investors”, with the latter group contributing zero, or minimal amounts, even when it would be more profitable to invest more.