"Are Japanese Spiteful?"Tatsuyoshi Saijo Abstract The talk is on the study of voluntary public good provision in the laboratory, in a cross-cultural experiment conducted in the United States, China, and Japan. In an environment of linear utility functions, Chinese are more consistent with "rational" behavior, but some Japanese take spiteful strategies to reduce more benefits than their own losses. In an environment of non-linear utility functions with a participation stage, I find that only the American data are consistent with the evolutionary-stable-strategy Nash equilibrium predictions, and that behavior is significantly different across countries. Japanese subjects are more likely to act spitefully in the early periods of the experiment. This spiteful behavior eventually leads to more efficient public good contributions for Japanese subjects than for American subjects. |