Resumo

One important question related to public goods is the following: how much money are people willing to pay for their provision? Two other questions are: (i) will people take part in collective actions involving public goods if they notice that the provision will take place regardless of individual contributions?; (ii) will individual actions lead to social inefficient results?

The main goal of this paper is to present a novel characterization of free-riding behavior and test hypotheses related to group size and subjects’ specific characteristics.

First, it presents a profile of individuals who present opportunistic behavior in collective-action dilemmas. Second, this paper can be seen as an empirical test of some of the hypotheses contained in Olson's (1965) classical study of public goods and the theory of groups. Finally, given some of the results reported above, they represent novel evidence related to the behavior of economists in the laboratory.

I run several small-scale public goods experiments in distinct settings (two business schools, a private university, a public university, and a public service school) using different types of subjects (undergraduates, MBA students, professors, and public service workers). Based on the results of these experiments, I build a Free-Rider Index (FRI), relating it to subjects’ socioeconomic characteristics and group size.

Main findings: (i) there are no significant differences among subjects in terms of gender, political orientation or school type; (ii) on average, undergraduates free ride less than MBA students and public service workers; (iii) economics students consistently free ride less than other majors; (iv) there is evidence suggesting the existence of an inverted “U-shaped” curve relating group size and free rider behavior.

These results are important for providing additional evidence related to social dilemmas, such as public goods provision and common pool resources’ management.

Andreoni, J. (1988). Why free ride? Strategies and learning in public goods experiments. Journal of Public Economics, 37(3), 291–304. Dawes, R. M., & Thaler, R. H. (1988). Anomalies: cooperation. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2(3), 187–197. Marwell, G., & Ames, R. E. (1981). Economists free ride, does anyone else? Journal of Public Economics, 15(3), 295–310. Olson, M. (1965). The logic of cooperative action: public goods and the theory of groups. Cambridge: Harvard University.