The paper "Are People Conditionally Cooperative? Evidence from a Public Goods Experiment" by Urs Fischbacher, Simon Gächter, and Ernst Fehr examines the importance of conditional cooperation in a one-shot public goods game. The authors use a variant of the strategy-method to elicit subjects' preferences for conditional cooperation. They find that about 50% of the subjects exhibit conditional cooperation, where their contribution increases with the average contribution of others. A third of the subjects are classified as free riders, and 14% display "hump-shaped" contribution patterns. The results suggest that the observed decay of cooperation in repeated public goods games can be explained by subjects' reactions to others' contributions, leading to a spiral downward trend in contributions over time. The study provides evidence that despite a majority of conditional cooperators, free riding remains pervasive in anonymous interactions.The paper "Are People Conditionally Cooperative? Evidence from a Public Goods Experiment" by Urs Fischbacher, Simon Gächter, and Ernst Fehr examines the importance of conditional cooperation in a one-shot public goods game. The authors use a variant of the strategy-method to elicit subjects' preferences for conditional cooperation. They find that about 50% of the subjects exhibit conditional cooperation, where their contribution increases with the average contribution of others. A third of the subjects are classified as free riders, and 14% display "hump-shaped" contribution patterns. The results suggest that the observed decay of cooperation in repeated public goods games can be explained by subjects' reactions to others' contributions, leading to a spiral downward trend in contributions over time. The study provides evidence that despite a majority of conditional cooperators, free riding remains pervasive in anonymous interactions.