Abstract:
Laboratory experiments are used to study the voluntary provision of a pure public good in
the presence of an anonymous external donor. The external funds are used in two different
settings, lump-sum matching and one-to-one matching, to examine how allocations to the public
good are affected. The experimental results reveal that allocations to the public good under lumpsum
matching are significantly higher, and have significantly lower within-group dispersion,
relative to one-to-one matching and a baseline setting without external matching funds.
