ANONYMITY AND THE VOLUNTARY PROVISION OF PUBLIC-GOODS

Experimental research investigating the voluntary provision of a pure public good has shown that participants consistently allocate a portio n of their resources to this good when the full-information noncoopera tive game theoretic (Nash) prediction is to allocate zero resources to this good, This paper considers whether the discrepancy between empir ical results and the Nash prediction is due to a lack of anonymity. We report a sequence of public goods experiments in which participants d o not know the identity of other group members and the experimenter ca nnot associate any participant's decisions with that person's identity , The results indicate that these procedures do not alter the tendency for token allocations to differ from the Nash prediction.