Sakshi Upadhyay Speaks on Coalition Formation in Public Good Games

Sakshi Upadhyay, a PhD student in the Department of Economics and PPE Research Fellow at the Kellogg Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, will give a talk on the topic “To Join or Not to Join: Coalition Formation in Public Good Games.”

The talk will take place on November 4, 2020, from 4-5:30pm via Zoom (Meeting ID: 948 6787 8733). This talk is restricted to Virginia Tech users. Please log into Zoom with your Virginia Tech email address.

The talk is tailored to appeal to both students and faculty, with plenty of time for discussion and interaction with the guest speaker. You are cordially invited to attend.

Here is the abstract of the talk: Commitment devices such as coalitions can increase outcome efficiency in public goods provision. This paper studies the role of social preference in a two stage public good game where, in the first stage, heterogeneous agents first choose whether or not to join a coalition then, in the next stage, the coalition votes on whether its members will contribute. We find that individuals with stronger social preferences are more likely to join the coalition and vote for the coalition to contribute to the public good. We further show that higher marginal benefits of contribution leads to more people joining the coalition and contributing to the public good. These results hold whether the coalition’s decision is determined by a majority voting or a unanimous voting rule. The results are also robust to different model specifications. We also test theoretical predictions of our model using laboratory experiments.

Please also see this three-part series about experimental economics and Sakshi’s work more generally.

About 70 faculty members and students attended the talk. Here is a Zoom snapshot.