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Estimation of Treatment Effects in Repeated Public Goods Experiments

Author

Listed:
  • Jianning Kong

    (School of Economics, Shandong University, Shandong 250100, China)

  • Donggyu Sul

    (School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75080, USA)

Abstract

This paper provides a new statistical model for repeated voluntary contribution mechanism games. In a repeated public goods experiment, contributions in the first round are cross-sectionally independent simply because subjects are randomly selected. Meanwhile, contributions to a public account over rounds are serially and cross-sectionally correlated. Furthermore, the cross-sectional average of the contributions across subjects usually decreases over rounds. By considering this non-stationary initial condition—the initial contribution has a different distribution from the rest of the contributions—we model statistically the time varying patterns of the average contribution in repeated public goods experiments and then propose a simple but efficient method to test for treatment effects. The suggested method has good finite sample performance and works well in practice.

Suggested Citation

  • Jianning Kong & Donggyu Sul, 2018. "Estimation of Treatment Effects in Repeated Public Goods Experiments," Econometrics, MDPI, vol. 6(4), pages 1-24, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jecnmx:v:6:y:2018:i:4:p:43-:d:179081
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    References listed on IDEAS

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