The organizers of the initiative are Jörg Oechssler and Georg Weizsäcker. Both are professors of economics (Heidelberg and Berlin respectively) and have researched and taught on the theory and empirical evidence of trust games, communication and the provision of public goods. You can contact them via the email addresses [email protected] and [email protected].
More information about the organizers is available on the personal websites of
Georg Weizsäcker and Jörg Oechssler.
The described mechanism follows the principles that are also used in the class of ‘Conditional Cooperation Mechanisms' (Oechssler et al, 2022): the dynamic structure of the mechanism enables a successive increase in contributions without losing previous promises. The property that all contributions are conditional on other people’s contribution creates the possibility that one’s own contribution encourages other people to make higher contributions, too. There is ample evidence in behavioral economic research that contributions to common goods are of a conditional nature (e.g. Fischbacher and Gächter, 2010, Breitmoser, 2015) and that mechanisms that are simple, in particular with information about events that have already occurred (Li, 2017) and with uniform contribution levels (Ockenfels and Schmidt, 2021), are relatively successful.
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The organizers would like to thank numerous colleagues for valuable suggestions, discussions and joint work, which form the scientific basis of this initiative.
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