Conference Agenda

We analyze a threshold public goods game in which players have varying preferences for public goods provision, motivated by the challenges of coordinating climate change mitigation efforts in the presence of asymmetries among involved agents. The setup chosen specifically allows for an analysis of the trade-off between efficiency and equity. We choose a preference specification allowing for a variety of other-regarding preferences and hypothesize that benefit symmetry among players facilitates coordination due to converging focal points of efficiency and equity. Increasing degrees of asymmetry lead to diverging focal points, rendering cooperation more difficult. Our theoretical predictions are supported by preliminary experimental evidence. We find that provision is most frequent when players are symmetric. An increase in the degree of asymmetry does not significantly hamper provision success, suggesting that the extent of asymmetry is not salient. However, in unsuccessful groups, total contributions decline as player heterogeneity increases. Our experimental treatment allows us to disentangle the role of efficiency concerns in these patterns. Furthermore, we investigate how different social preference types shape these contribution dynamics.