Cooperation in Virtual Reality: Exploring Environmental Decision-Making through a Real-Effort Threshold Public Goods Game

We describe our contribution to the IEEE 3DUI Contest for IEEE VR 2025. Specifically, we present a collaborative Virtual Environment (VE) to be used as an innovative method to conduct experimental research in behavioral economics studies. Indeed, in such a field, analyzing collaborative behaviors is crucial, and collaborative VEs might be exploited to better control the variables of interest while preserving a high sense of realism and presence, to spread collaboration across wider geographical areas, and to maintain anonymity while preserving the sense of being with peers inside environments. The developed system aims to be used as a general framework to perform a wide range of studies in the field, here explicitly focusing on a real-effort recycling task, where subjects decide whether to prioritize individual gains or contribute to a collective effort to meet a common recycling objective.