The Importance of Knowing Your Own Reputation

Abstract

We experimentally investigate a finitely repeated public good game with varying partners. Within each period, participants are pairwise matched and contribute simultaneously. Participants are informed about contributions and each participant evaluates her partner’s contribution. At the beginning of the next period, participants are re-matched and, except for the two control treatments, receive information resulting from the previous period’s evaluations. There are three information treatments: Participants receive information either about their own evaluation or about their partner’s evaluation or both. Although participants condition their contributions on their partners’ evaluations, this information alone is insufficient to raise contributions. Only if participants also know their own evaluation, we do find a significant increase in contributions relative to the control treatments.