Natural Disaster Risk and Public Good Provision: Evidence from a Multi-Country Laboratory Experiment

This pre-analysis plan (PAP) describes the empirical strategy for a multi-country laboratory experiment investigating the determinants of community investment in public goods aimed at enhancing local resilience under natural disaster risk. The experiment simulates a community of four homogeneous members who generate income through electricity consumption. The decision environment focuses on how community members collectively determine the scale of investment in an Electrical Energy Storage (EES) system as a local public good that preserves the community's capacity for economic activity through mitigating the risk of disaster-induced outages. The experiment is conducted across four countries: South Korea; the United States; China; and Germany, with a minimum total of 960 student participants. Two institutional treatments govern the EES investment decision: in the first treatment (TR1), a standard voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM) is implemented, replicating a pure public goods game. In the second treatment (TR2), each of the four community members independently proposes their preferred EES scale; the community's EES level is then determined by the average of these proposals, with costs shared equally among members. Primary outcome variables include EES contribution levels, in-experiment disaster realizations, individual subjective disaster probability assessments, social norm measures, community-level income and inequality indicators. This PAP specifies directional hypotheses and pre-registers the causal identification strategy for examining how disaster experience, institutional coordination mechanisms, intra- and inter-community comparison, economic inequality, and cross-national cultural factors shape cooperative investment behavior.