THE EFFECTS OF GROUP-SIZE AND INCOME ON CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING

This paper examines the extent to which individual contributions to pu blic television are explained by the size of the audience which receiv es the individual station's television signal. It also incorporates th e effects of income on contributions to public television in order to assess the combined effects of income and group size on contributions to public goods. The existing literature on contributions to public go ods differs from this paper in several respects. First, this study use s field data to test the effects of group size on a public good. The m ajority of the existing literature on public goods contributions is ba sed on experimental data. Most of this literature addresses the issue of free riding behavior, not the effects on contributions of different sized groups. Finally, the theory of group size developed in prior wo rk does not address the issue of how contributions differ for groups w hich are very different in size.