Pro-social preferences and self-interest in farmers' voluntary contribution to public goods

Voluntary contributions to public goods are often interpreted as evidence for individuals’ altruism, willing to sacrifice their own individual welfare to benefit the group’s welfare, with inequity aversion leading to a reduction in voluntary contributions by conditional cooperator confronted to non-contributors (Burton-Chellew and West 2021). In this paper, we test whether this interpretation holds true by running a behavioural experiment in which small holder farmers from Morocco and Uganda play an adapted version of the public good game, in which the public good generated does not benefit one’s own group but another group, reflecting pure altruism. We compare the voluntary contributions in such a setting with the contributions made by the same participants in a standard public good game, in which the public good benefit a participant’s own group, reflecting expectations of benefiting from the public good in the voluntary contributions. We find contrasting results depending on the context in which the experiment is implemented.