When Does Reputation Help the Future? Audience Presence and Identity Disclosure in Intergenerational Resource Dilemmas

Many environmental problems, from climate change to resource depletion, are intergenerational dilemmas: the present generation bears conservation costs, whereas the benefits go to future generations, who can neither observe nor reciprocate. Reputation reliably sustains cooperation among contemporaries, but whether it works across generations remains unclear. In two experiments using an intergenerational goods game, we examined how the audience of disclosure and the type of information disclosed affect contributions to a resource passed from one generation to the next, and whether social value