Continuous Time and Communication in a Public-goods Experiment

Abstract: We investigate the nature of continuous-time strategic interactions in public-goods games. In one set of treatments, four subjects make contribution decisions in continuous time while in another they make them only at discrete points of time. The effect of continuous time is muted in public-goods games compared to simpler social dilemmas; the data suggest that widespread coordination problems are to blame. With a rich communication protocol, these coordination problems disappear and the median subject contributes fully to the public good, with no time decay. At the median, the same communication protocol is less than half as effective in discrete time