Abstract

Conditional cooperation is the tendency to cooperate if and only if others cooperate. This paper aims to ascertain the importance of conditional cooperation and the effect of perceived corruption and cultural environments on individuals’ behaviors in the public goods games in a public game by replicating the seminal Fischbacher et al. (2001) experiment and comparing results between Nigeria and Canada. This thesis proposes to explore the reliability of classifying participants into distinct behavioral types – such as conditional cooperators, free riders, and triangular contributors – based on their contribution patterns. Additionally, a post-experiment questionnaire – which is modified based on the European Social Survey (ESS), Value Survey Model (VSM, 2013), and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) National Survey on Quality and Integrity of Public Services – is employed to explore how individuals in both countries perceive their cultural and socio-economic differences, and how perceptions, particularly regarding corruption, influence their cooperative behavior and contributions to public goods.