Rui Zhou

Resolving public goods problems is important, yet field evidence remains limited. We conduct a field experiment on property fee collection with 2,669 households in a Chinese residential community with limited legal enforcement, providing identical peer information framed as majority compliance (positive) or minority non-compliance (negative). Negative framing accelerates payment by 4.4 days on average, a 35.5% improvement relative to the control, while positive framing has no significant effect. Effects are heterogeneous: payment speed increases by 82.3% among early payers and 17.5% among late payers, but decreases by 12.1% among on-time payers. These findings highlight the importance of peer information framing and payer heterogeneity for norm-based interventions in real-world public goods settings.

Keywords: Public goods provision; peer information; framing effects; payment compliance