Why do outsiders make donations to public good providers?

This chapter presents novel data on the motivations that explain outsiders’ transfer donations to insiders who provide a public good. The baseline decision setting is the insider-outsider game first presented in Blanco, Haller, Walker (2018, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management ) inspired by settings of payments for ecosystem services. In the game, insiders provide a public good that benefits both insiders and outsiders and where outsiders can send transfer donations to compensate insiders for their efforts. We present results for 524 outsiders making transfer decisions under eight alternative institutional conditions. The institutions under consideration vary the distribution of payments between insiders, the presence of an additionality criterion, and the existence of competition among insiders to receive payments. We present aggregate results on the relative frequency of motivations as well as the differences across institutions. We also explore the relevance of these motivations on transfer decisions when pooling all treatments and separately for the different institutions. Our results show that the three main motivation factors are cooperation , egoism and insiders-outsiders reciprocity , with insiders-outsiders reciprocity being the most often reported. These motivations are important determinants of outsiders’ transfer decision: cooperation motives correlate with higher transfers and egoism with lower transfers by outsiders. We also observe differences in the relevant factors for the different institutional conditions, including some relevant for policy implications that we highlight in the conclusions.