Abstract
We analyse a threshold public goods game in which players have varying benefits from public goods provision, motivated by the existence of large heterogeneities between countries in international environmental cooperation. The setup chosen specifically allows for an analysis of the trade-off between efficiency and equity. We choose a preference specification allowing for a variety of other-regarding preferences and hypothesize that benefit symmetry among players facilitates coordination due to converging focal points of efficiency and equity. Increasing degrees of asymmetry lead to diverging focal points, rendering cooperation more difficult. Our theoretical predictions are supported by preliminary experimental evidence. We find that provision is most frequent when players are symmetric. While increasing the degree of asymmetry does not significantly hamper provision success, contributions become more volatile the more heterogeneous players are. Analysing how players share contribution costs, we see that the extent of asymmetry is not salient, leading to relatively constant burden-sharing across treatments despite varied levels of inequity.