Capuno, Joseph J.Carlos, Franz Nicole L.Marasigan, Mariella Jasmin P.2024-09-302024-09-302017-12https://selib.upd.edu.ph/etdir/handle/123456789/476Economic theory predicts that voluntary provision of public goods leads to sub- optimal results because free-riding is the dominant strategy, but government intervention can fix this problem. Although this is the case, previous studies have provided evidence that individuals contribute non-zero amounts; total free-riding is not always observed. This pro- social behavior of individuals are believed to be caused by innate altruism, conformity with social norms, or group-mediated enforcement mechanisms. Also, the effectiveness of punishment in promoting voluntary contribution are observed in some other studies from outside the Philippines. With the knowledge that social norms vary from region to region and observations being mostly foreign, we were inspired to focus more on the Philippine setting by conducting experiments that involved the students of the University of the Philippines School of Economics. This study tests a variation of a public goods game with punishment mechanism which was shown in previous studies to reduce free-riding. We test if punishment will continue to induce cooperative behavior under different conditions. In this game, public goods are only provided when total group contribution reaches a certain required amount and it is up to the players to decide on the amount they are willing to contribute considering that they have an incentive to free-ride on the contributions of other players. Besides the game, a common module was also used to gather data on the players’ socioeconomic background and personality traits. Test of means was used to check if there are differences in the contributions among players while regression analysis was done to dissect the effects of different factors in cooperation and free-riding behavior in the game. As expected, total free-riding was not observed and players contributed non-zero amounts in the provision of public goods. Based on the results, age consistently showed a positive effect on cooperative behavior while some factors related to academic background seem to encourage free-riding behavior. Regarding personality traits, it was observed that 3 neuroticism has a negative effect on cooperation while agreeableness has a positive effect, but only under certain conditions. Some of the players could be considered highly altruistic, but their behaviors seemed to depend on the level of threshold. Exclusion as a punishment is highly effective in reducing free-riding, but this observation did not hold when higher thresholds were introduced. As thresholds increase, reaching the target becomes dependent on all the players of the group which made it more difficult for the players to acquire returns due to free- riders.enpersonalitysocioeconomicpunishment mechanismsfree-riding behaviorThesis