Public goods and future audiences: acting as role models? * Giuseppe Attanasi † , Roberta Dess´ ı ‡ , Fr´ ed´ eric Moisan § and Donald Robertson ¶ September 13, 2019 Abstract Individuals’ decisions to behave prosocially (or the contrary) can often be observed by other individuals, with no direct connection to them, but who may nevertheless be influenced by them (e.g. through social media). Does knowing that they may be viewed as role models by other, notably younger, people affect the way individuals behave? Does it make them more likely to behave prosocially? We study how participants’ behavior in an experimental public good game is affected when they know that information about their choices and outcomes, together with different sets of information about their identity, will be transmitted the following year to a set of new, unknown, younger participants - with no payoff linkages between the two sets of play- ers. When subjects know their photo, choices and outcomes will be transmitted, they contribute significantly less. We consider different possible explanations, and argue that the most convincing is based on image concerns, but in a surprising way: subjects in the photo treat- ment care about not being perceived as “suckers” by future players. JEL classification: C91, C92, H41. Keywords: Role models, image concerns, identity, audience, pub- lic goods. * We thank Dan Ariely, Syngjoo Choi, Fabrice Etil´ e, Edoardo Gallo, Sanxi Li, Aldo Rustichini, Andrew Schotter, Claudia Senik, Jean Tirole, Roberto Weber, Jiang Xu and participants at several seminars and conferences for comments and discussions. Roberta Dess´ ı acknowledges funding from ANR (Investissements d’Avenir program) under grant ANR-17-EURE-0010. † University of Nice; giuseppe.attanasi@unice.fr ‡ Toulouse School of Economics (IAST), University of Toulouse Capitole, Toulouse, France; roberta.dessi@tse-fr.eu. § University of Cambridge; fm442@cam.ac.uk. ¶ University of Cambridge; dr10011@cam.ac.uk. 1