The role of beliefs, trust, and risk in contributions to a public good

•This paper investigates how beliefs, trust and risk relate to cooperation.•Beliefs about others’ cooperation and trust are positively associated with cooperation.•Elicited risk preferences do not explain cooperation. This paper experimentally investigates if and how beliefs, trust, and risk attitudes are associated with cooperative behavior. By applying incentivized elicitation methods to measure these concepts, we find that beliefs about others’ cooperation and trust are positively correlated with cooperation in a public goods game. However, even though contributing to a public good resembles a situation of making decisions under strategic uncertainty, elicited risk preferences do not seem to explain cooperation in a systematic way.