Are low-income households conditionally cooperative? Contrasting evidence from a field-adapted contributions game

We use a field-adapted contributions game in rural Mozambique to elicit how respondents’ willingness to donate money or volunteer time for a new community programme varies with others’ participation. While past studies suggest most people are conditional cooperators (contributing more as others do), most of our sample (57%) are unclassified by standard typology. Instead, we find surprisingly high prevalence of two largely unrecognized types: counter-conditional cooperators (contributing less the more others contribute) and V-shaped cooperators (contributing less, then more), for monetary donations (30% and 19%) and volunteering (35% and 12%). Our study motivates future research in non-laboratory and low-income settings.