Cooperation and leadership in a segregated community: A lab-in-the-field experiment in a South-African township (original) (raw)
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Fairness, reciprocity and inequality: experimental evidence from South Africa
2007
This thesis consists of six papers, related to artifactual field experiments, conducted in South Africa. The main focus of the thesis is the effect of different forms of heterogeneity on cooperation and punishment within groups. We conduct public goods experiments where the first study draws on a sample of nine fishing communities in South Africa; the second is conducted in Cape Town amongst four high schools with distinctly different socioeconomic profiles. The first paper "Bridging the Great Divide in South Africa: Inequality and Punishment in the Provision of Public Goods" explores the effect of income inequality and peer punishment on cooperation. Aggregate cooperation is higher in both the voluntary contribution mechanism and punishment treatments for unequal groups. Low endowment players also contribute a significantly greater fraction of their endowment to the public good than high endowment players in the presence of punishment. Demands for punishment by low and high endowment players are similar, irrespective of differences in relative costs, and in unequal groups free-riding is punished more, specifically by low endowment players. We observe inequality aversion both in endowments and with respect to the interaction of endowments and contributions. We explicitly examine the impact of heterogeneity in actual per capita household incomes and expenditures of participants on contributions to the public good in the second paper: "Games and Economic Behavior in South African Fishing Communities." We find that contributions to the public good are increasing in income levels, and income heterogeneity is associated with greater contributions towards the public good, especially by those at the lower end of the income distribution. Racial and gender diversity in groups tends to lower contributions to the public pool. In the third paper "Contributing My Fair Share: Inequality and the Provision of Public Goods in Poor Fishing Communities in South Africa" we consider only the treatments without punishment. We find that aggregate contributions are marginally higher in unequally endowed groups, and that low endowment individuals contribute a i Those who deserve the greatest acknowledgement for bringing this research to life are my research assistants in both field experiments. It was a massive endeavor which would not have been possible without your hard work, endurance, patience and humor. My sincere thanks to all the people who participated in the experiments and made the fieldwork one of the most rewarding parts of this research. The people I have met in Sweden during my stay here have enriched my life tremendously. I am grateful to each and every one of you who have shared with me some of the life here. I would like to give much acknowledgment to my classmates, Rahimaisa Abdula, Wisdom Akpalu, Mintewab Bezabih and Jorge Garcia who have become more like brothers and sisters and shared in all that this experience brought us. My sincere thanks to Elizabeth Földi for her great spirit and enthusiasm and endless assistance. I would like to thank a number of people whose friendship and kindness I
2007
Mounting evidence suggests that the outcomes of laboratory public goods games, and collective action in firms, communities, and polities, reflect the presence in most groups of individuals having differing preferences and beliefs. We designed a public goods experiment with targeted punishment opportunities to (a) confirm subject heterogeneity, (b) test the stability of subjects ’ types and (c) test the proposition that differences in group outcomes can be predicted with knowledge of the types of individuals who compose those groups. We demonstrate that differences in the inclination to cooperate have considerable persistence, that differences in levels of cooperation after many periods of repeated interaction can be significantly predicted by differences in inclination to cooperate which are manifested in the initial periods, and that significantly greater social efficiency can be achieved by grouping less cooperative subjects with those inclined to punish free riding while excludin...
ECONOMIC STUDIES DEPARTMENT OF …, 2006
We explore the effect of income inequality and peer punishment on voluntary provision of public goods in an experimental context. Our sample draws from nine fishing communities in South-Africa where high levels of inequality prevail. We find that aggregate cooperation is higher in both the voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM) and punishment treatments for unequal groups. Once peer sanctioning is introduced over-contribution by low relative to high endowment players observed in the VCM Cardenas. We would also like to thank our research assistants and all the people from the communities we worked with. ‡ University of Cape Town, School of Economics, Telephone: +27 (0)21 650 3757. Address: University of Cape Town,Private Bag, Rondebosch, 7700, South Africa. 1 treatment is significantly enhanced. Demand for punishment by low and high endowment players are similar, irrespective of differences in relative costs, and in unequal groups free-riding is punished more, specifically by low endowment players. We observe inequality aversion both in endowments and with respect to the interaction of endowments and contributions: high endowment players receive more punishment, but also receive more punishment for negative deviation from the group mean share.
Ethnolinguistic Diversity and the Provision of Public Goods: Experimental Evidence from South Africa
2011
This paper utilises techniques in experimental economics to investigate the impact of racial identity on the provision of public goods. A large sample of Black and White undergraduate University students were recruited to participate in public goods games, where the racial composition of the groups was varied to include All White groups, All Black groups and mixed race groups (comprising Black and White students). The results show that contrary to predictions from social identity theory, racial homogeneity in a group does not uniformly predict higher contributions to the public pool. Rather, it would appear that observable racial identity may convey information about extensive heterogeneity as opposed to homogeneity, especially where race is highly correlated with diversity in other dimensions, such as ethnolinguistic diversity. In accordance with the established macroeconometric literature on the provision of public goods, the results presented in this study show that contributions...
The role of institutional incentives and the exemplar in promoting cooperation
Scientific Reports, 2014
People on average do not play their individually rational Nash equilibrium (NE) strategy in game experiments based on the public goods game (PGG) that model social dilemmas. Differences from NE behavior have also been observed in PGG experiments that include incentives to cooperate, especially when these are peer-incentives administered by the players themselves. In our repeated PGG experiment, an institution rewards and punishes individuals based on their contributions. The primary experimental result is that institutions which both reward and punish (IRP) promote cooperation significantly better than either institutions which only punish (IP) or which only reward (IR), and that IP has contribution levels significantly above IR. Although comparing their single-round NE strategies correctly predicts which incentives are best at promoting cooperation, individuals do not play these strategies overall. Our analysis shows that other intrinsic motivations that combine conforming behavior with reactions to being rewarded/ punished provide a better explanation of observed outcomes. In our experiments, some individuals who display more cooperation than other individuals can be regarded as the exemplars (or leaders). The role of these exemplars in promoting cooperation provides important insights into understanding cooperation in PGG and the effectiveness of institutional incentives at promoting desirable societal behavior.
Income Inequality and the Provision of Public Goods: When the Real World Mimics the Lab
2008
Heterogeneity, be it in terms of wealth, race or gender differences, affects the ability of communities and groups to resolve collective action problems. However, the theoretical, empirical and experimental literature in this field remains mixed and often, contradictory. In this paper, we report the results of linear public goods games conducted with a large sample of individuals from fishing communities in South Africa, that explicitly examine the impact of heterogeneity in actual per capita household incomes and expenditures of participants on contributions to the public good. We find that contributions to the public good are increasing in income levels, and that income heterogeneity is associated with greater contributions towards the public good, especially by those at the lower end of the income distribution. These results, based on the real world attributes of participants, match the results we find when we introduce heterogeneity explicitly as a treatment variable in an experimental setting. To our knowledge, this is the first case in which real world heterogeneity has been shown to affect contributions to the public good in the same direction as experimentally induced heterogeneity. In addition, we examine the impact of racial and gender diversity in groups on contributions to the public good, and find that such diversity tends to lower contributions to the public pool. This trend is exacerbated if one allows participants to punish free riders in their groups.
Cooperation under the threat of expulsion in a public goods experiment
Journal of Public Economics, 2005
In a public goods experiment with the opportunity to vote to expel members of a group, we found that contributions rose to nearly 100% of endowments with significantly higher efficiency compared with a no-expulsion baseline. Our findings support the intuition that the threat of expulsion or ostracism is a device that helps some groups to provide public goods. D
The Impact of Inequality on Cooperation: An Experimental Study
This paper analyzes the impact of inequality in the distribution of endowments on contributions. We conduct a lab experiment using the well-known Public Good Game to test the relation between inequality and contribution to a public fund. We introduce the possibility of choosing among three different redistribution rules: equidistribution, proportional to contribution and progressive to endowment. This novelty, combined with a payoff function that depends also on previous period behavior, allows us to verify the hypothesis that players show inequity averse preferences. Results show that inequality has a negative impact on individual contribution. Since inequality decreases during repetitions, we deduce that players show inequity averse preferences.