At the beginning of each period you will be asked to allocate your endowment between a private account and a group account.
The tokens that you place in the private account have a return of 1. This means that, at the end of a given period, your private account will contain exactly the amount of tokens you put into the private account at the beginning of the period. Nobody except yourself benefits from your private account.
The tokens that you place in the group account are summed together with the tokens that the other three members of your group place in the group account. Regardless of how many tokens you allocated to the group account, you as well as the other members of your group will each get at least 27.5% of that sum of tokens.
The exact quota determining your individual share of the group account may vary from period to period, which is why we will display it on your decision screen in each period. More precisely, the return you receive from the group account depends on how your endowment compares to the whole group's endowments. In case you have an endowment while the other group members have nothing, the quota will be smaller. If, in contrast, you have no endowment but some other group member has an endowment, the quota will be higher. Hence, the lower your endowment in a given period (compared to others) the higher your individual share of the group account in that period. This relationship is visualized in the following figure.
Your endowment at the beginning of the second period will be equal to the amount of tokens you accumulated in the first period. Hence, you'll start the second period with all the tokens from your private account plus your individual share of the group account at the end of the first period.
In the second period, you will be again asked to allocate the endowment you accumulated between a private account and a group account. Both the private and the group account work in exactly the same manner as in the first period.
The structure of the experiment at all subsequent periods is identical: your endowment at the beginning of each period is equal to the amount of tokens in your private account plus your share of the group account at the end of the previous period.
Your total income in the end of the experiment is equal to the amount of tokens in your private account and your share of the group account at the end of period {{session.config.num_rounds}}.