Social influence

In traditional public good experiments participants receive an endowment from the experimenter that can be invested in a public good or kept in a private account. In this paper we present an experimental environment that uses participants time as their natural endowment, which can be invested in the public good experiment. The experiment runs for several days and participants can make contributions to the threshold public good by logging into a web application and performing virtual actions.

Global sustainable use of natural resources confronts our society as a collective action problem at an unprecedented scale. Past research has provided insights into the attributes of local social-ecological systems that enable effective self-governance. In this note we discuss possible mechanisms to scale up those community level insights to a larger scale. We do this by combining insights from social-psychology on the role of information feedback with the increasing availability of information technology.