Although most people are not outright selfish, cooperation frequently fails. Fischbacher and Gächter (2010) explain the well-established decline of contributions in repeated public good games with a genuine imperfection in conditional cooperation. Reanalyzing their data, we offer a more nuanced explanation. Conditional cooperators are nearly perfect, when others cooperate as well. Yet conditional cooperators strongly react to negative experiences, chiefly caused by selfish individuals. These bad experiences are the main driver for the imperfection in conditional cooperation and thus of the downward trend in contributions in repeated public good games.
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Engel et al. (2024) studied this question.
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