The effect of incomplete information in a threshold public goods experiment

Fiscal stress and decreasing government budgets have led to renewed interes t in voluntary contributions for the funding of public goods. This paper ex perimentally examines the Provision Point Mechanism (PPM), a voluntary cont ribution mechanism for the funding of threshold public goods. Previous expe riments have demonstrated the effectiveness of this mechanism in providing public goods, however all were conducted in an environment of complete info rmation, which fails to capture the uncertainties of the real world. This s tudy tests the efficacy of the PPM in informationally limited settings. We find no significant differences in the rate of successful provisions or lev el of group contributions when subjects have Limited information about the valuations of others than when they have complete information.