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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

ethnicity, public goods provision, Indian

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

Political Science

Abstract

The provision of public goods is, on average, significantly poorer in ethnically-diverse communities (Banerjee et al. 2005). Three potential mechanisms have been put forward to explain this phenomenon: preferences, technology and strategy selection (Habyarimana et al. 2007). While the landmark experiment on this topic concluded that strategy selection best explained poor public goods provision, we posit that the role of preferences is significant (ibid.). The lab experiments we conducted tested for differences in preference between ethnic groups in the Southeast Indian city of Chennai.

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