Partner Selection in Public Goods Experiments

This paper studies the effect of introducing costly partner selection for the voluntarycontribution to a public good. Subjects participate in six sequences offive rounds of a two-person public good game in partner design. At the end ofeach sequence, subjects can select a new partner out of six group members. Unidirectionaland bidirectional partner selection mechanisms are introduced andcompared to controls with random partner rematching. Results demonstratesignificantly higher cooperation in correspondence to unidirectional partner selectionthan to bidirectional selection and random rematching. Average monetaryeffort for being able to choose a partner is substantially high and remainsstable.