• Inclusion
• Theory

• External Shocks

• Accommodating newcomers

How people cooperate to provide public goods is a major scientific question and crucial for addressing many societal problems. Most research on cooperation in public good provision studied situations in which the same members of a group interact repeatedly or situations in which these members interact only once. However, many public good problems are characterized by a changing composition of group members over time. How changing groups affect cooperation in public good provision is not well understood. To address this issue, we analyze a large dataset from an online public goods game comprising 1.5 million contribution decisions made by 135.000 players in 11.500 groups with 250.000 recorded changes in the composition of these groups. We find that changes in group composition negatively relate to cooperation in public good provision, mainly because newcomers contribute less than incumbents. During the process of moving from newcomer status to incumbent status, individuals increase their contribution to the public good.

What is the relationship between changes in group composition and cooperation in terms of contributions to a public good? Can this relationship be attributed to the contributions of the newcomers, the incumbents, or both?

• External data

• Observation

No

The dataset as described in the linked source

• CSV
• STATA

• Structured

• English

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