EXPLAINING PRIVATE PROVISION OF PUBLIC GOODS BY CONDITIONAL COOPERATION: AN INDIRECT EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH

We adopt an indirect evolutionary approach to investigate whether and when conditional cooperation can explain the voluntary contribution phenomenon often observed in public goods experiments and in real life. Formally, conditional cooperation is captured by a guilt parameter describing how much an individual feels guilty about contributing less than the average. We find that the evolutionary stability of conditional cooperation depends on what is known about the (individual) guilt parameter of other group members. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006.