On generosity in public good and charitable dictator games

We examine the relationship between generosity in charitable dictator games (CDGs) and public good games (PGGs). We construct a novel generalized game that subsumes both as special cases and present experimental subjects with different blends of CDG and PGG tasks. Generosity in the CDG and PGG are only weakly correlated, in spite of close experimental control on confounding factors. We furthermore demonstrate how underlying preferences shape these behaviors, revealing important distinctions between preferences for charity and public good provision. Our findings have implications for the generalizability of existing experimental results that rely upon these games.