Economic inequality is rising globally and due to developments in information technologies and globalization, nowadays individuals are more exposed to such an inequality than ever. Recent studies show that exposure to inequality may shape economic decisions. In this article, we test whether contributions in the public goods game are sensitive to information about inequality of personal benefits between groups. Our results show that learning the return levels of another group with higher (lower) benefits decreases (increases) the contributions with a stronger reaction by low benefit groups. Our further tests show that this effect diminishes when the benefit difference between the groups gets smaller. These results suggest that exposure to inequality might have a detrimental impact on public goods provision, yet this effect gets negligible as economic inequality reduces.

经济不平等在全球范围内正在加剧，并且由于信息技术和全球化的发展，如今个人比以往任何时候都更容易受到这种不平等的影响。最近的研究表明，暴露于不平等状况可能会影响经济决策。在本文中，我们测试了公共物品博弈中的贡献是否对有关群体之间个人利益不平等的信息敏感。我们的结果表明，学习另一个受益较高（较低）的群体的回报水平会降低（增加）低受益群体的反应更强的贡献。我们的进一步测试表明，当两组之间的收益差异变小时，这种影响就会减弱。这些结果表明，暴露于不平等状况可能会对公共物品的供应产生不利影响，