School of Economic and Trade, Hubei University of Economics, Wuhan, China.
Department of Economics and Finance, Ming Chuan University, Taoyuan City, Taiwan.
PLoS One. 2024 Feb 29;19(2):e0299196. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0299196. eCollection 2024.
This paper empirically examines the signaling role of feedback in the repeated public goods game. To eliminate the potential impact of feedback's informative function, we test whether the provision of detailed yet redundant feedback leads to increased contributions. Our findings demonstrate that redundant information significantly promotes contributions. Given the equal informative power in both treatments, the observed increase in contributions can be attributed to the signaling effect. Furthermore, an examination of cooperative disposition heterogeneity reveals that conditional cooperators primarily utilize feedback for its informative function, while free riders primarily exploit it for its signaling function. These results offer empirical evidence of the signaling function of feedback and offer valuable insights into the design of feedback provision in repeated public goods settings.
本文通过实证检验了反馈在重复公共品博弈中的信号传递作用。为了消除反馈信息功能的潜在影响，我们测试了提供详细但冗余的反馈是否会导致贡献的增加。我们的研究结果表明，冗余信息显著促进了贡献。考虑到两种处理方式的信息功能相等，观察到的贡献增加可以归因于信号效应。此外，对合作倾向异质性的考察表明，条件合作者主要利用反馈的信息功能，而搭便车者主要利用其信号功能。这些结果为反馈的信号传递功能提供了经验证据，并为重复公共品情境中反馈提供的设计提供了有价值的见解。
