Public goods games for collective agri-environmental contracts design

Abstract: This thesis conducts a structured literature review of public goods games (PGG) experiments to analyze the differences between laboratory and field studies and to understand whether farmers cooperate more or less than standard PGG subjects. In addition, novel data on public goods games conducted on European farmers from Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, and Poland are analyzed to understand the effect of heterogeneous starting endowments on cooperation. While farmers have higher cooperation levels on average, the difference between farmers and students are not statistically significant. German and Dutch farmers have higher contribution levels than Polish and Hungarian farmers in the standard version of the game, and heterogeneous endowments decrease cooperation levels except for Polish farmers. A reduction in cooperation levels under the heterogeneous endowment treatment is also found in the laboratory literature.