How do Goal Setting and Different Reward Schemes Affect Goal Achievement in Public Goods Games? | Alf Lim

The public goods game captures the social dilemma between cooperative behavior and free riding, which is often found in teamwork in various different organizations. Unfortunately, free riding is the dominant strategy in these situations unless different treatment effects are applied. This paper examines whether goal-setting theory (including voting on a difficult and specific exogenous goal, performance feedback, and incremental and lump-sum reward schemes) from motivational psychology can be utilized for groups as a coordination mechanism to curb falling cooperation rates in the standard public goods games. This research found that goal setting was unable to increase and sustain cooperation rates for groups, regardless of the reward scheme implemented. Furthermore, our operationalization of goal-setting theory to the public goods game seems to have weakened the goal commitment on the group level. Therefore, in comparison to the baseline, goal setting decreases the overall cooperation and performance.