The impact of endowment heterogeneity and origin on public good contributions: evidence from the lab

Recent experimental research suggests that unpredicted behavior in the lab may result from endowment distribution and origin. We design an experiment to explore the impact of heterogeneous endowments and earned endowments on observed contributions in a linear public good game. Our results suggest that contribution levels were significantly lower when groups had heterogeneous rather than homogeneous endowments, with this finding being independent of the origin of endowment. We did not find, however, that the lack of free-riding in public goods experiments was an artifact of endowment origin. Group members contributed about the same to the public good whether their endowments were earned or not. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.