Cooperation in Virtual Reality: Exploring Environmental Decision-Making through a Real-Effort Threshold Public Goods Game

We describe our contribution to the IEEE 3DUI Contest for IEEE VR 2025. Specifically, we present a collaborative Virtual Environment (VE) to be used as an innovative method to conduct experimental research in behavioral economics studies. Indeed, in such a field, analyzing collaborative behaviors is crucial, and collaborative VEs might be exploited to better control the variables of interest while preserving a high sense of realism and presence, to spread collaboration across wider geographical areas, and to maintain anonymity while preserving the sense of being with peers in-side environments. The developed system aims to be used as a general framework to perform a wide range of studies in the field, here explicitly focusing on a real-effort recycling task, where subjects decide whether to prioritize individual gains or contribute to a collective effort to meet a common recycling objective.