ABSTRACT
Following a talk on provision of public goods delivered by the first author at Al-Gish (an Arab village in northern Israel), one activist who was unfamiliar with the experimental literature in the field remarked that the basic experimental paradigms she had just learned, fail to capture certain situations that she and her colleagues encounter in fund raising for public projects. She mentioned cases in which the needed funds may be supplied by an external source (e.g., the central government), and raised concerns that the knowledge that a project might be supported externally might discourage the public from contributing for its provision. On a much wider scale, similar concerns were recently voiced in England, where several newspaper articles expressed concerns that publications concerning financial support for charities by the lotteries might reduce the amount of public donations to these charities.
