Explaining Private Provision of Public Goods by Conditional Cooperation - An Evoltuionary Approach -

We adopt an evolutionary approach to investigate whether and when conditional cooperation can explain the voluntary contribution phenomenon often observed in public goods experiments and real life. Formally, conditional cooperation is captured by a regret parameter describing how much an individual regrets to contribute less than average. We find that the evolutionary stability of conditional cooperation depends on what is known about the (individual) regret parameters of other group members.