Trust, communication and equlibrium behaviour in public goods (original) (raw)
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Long-term evidence on cooperation and cultural differences in public goods dilemmas
Biology Letters
It is hard to isolate human cooperation features outside the prevalent experimental laboratory context in a controlled setting. Since cooperation rates are very context-sensitive, a new setting—a public goods game in an online game—is analysed. This unique dataset addresses multiple critical issues: it is more realistic, individuals have an intrinsic motivation to play, there are no observer effects, and data are available for more than 18 000 individuals playing over 10 months. Participants come from 10 countries, which allows us to test for cultural influences on cooperation. We find small differences in cooperation rates between countries, ranging from 8.5% (Argentina) to 14.1% (Greece). Moreover, cooperation remains stable over long periods of time. Different cultural, economic and religious backgrounds do not seem to have a discernible influence on cooperation rates. Instead, individual differences seem to play a larger role. Finally, cooperation levels may be lower than sugges...
Cooperation due to cultural norms, not individual reputation
Behavioural Processes, 2012
Increased cooperation in groups that are allowed to communicate (engage in "cheap talk") has been attributed to reputation-building and to cultural norms or culturally normal behavior. We tested these two theories by exposing groups of undergraduates to a public-goods social dilemma. Five groups were permitted to communicate via anonymous written messages that were read aloud. The groups with messaging contributed substantially more to the common good than the groups without messaging. Because the messages were anonymous, their efficacy cannot be explained by effects on reputation. Instead, the results point to the participants' histories of giving and receiving exhortations to cooperate -i.e., to culturally normal behavior (cultural norms).
Trust and Reciprocity: An International Experiment
2001
This paper identifies contexts in which trust and reciprocation are likely to arise. Using an experimental trust game we examine the influence of country, social distance and communication on trust and reciprocation in China, Japan, Korea, and the United States. We find mixed support for the commonly-accepted negative relationship between trust and social distance across the four countries. While social distance has the expected effect in the US, its effects internationally are more complex. We also show that even irrelevant communication influences game behavior, but that it is personal discussion rather than impersonal, that produces significantly higher levels of trust.
Cooperation,trust,and antagonism:How public goods are promoted
2013
One of the most continually vexing problems in society is the variability with which citizens support endeavors that are designed to help a great number of people. In this article, we examine the twin roles of cooperative and antagonistic behavior in this variability. We find that each plays an important role, though their contributions are, understandably, at odds. It is this opposition that produces seeming unpredictability in citizen response to collective need. In fact, we suggest that careful consideration of the research allows one to often predict when efforts to provide a collectively beneficial good will succeed and when they will fail. To understand the dynamics of participation in response to collective need, it is necessary to distinguish between the primary types of need situations. A public good is an entity that relies in whole or in part on contributions to be provided. Examples of public goods are charities and public broadcasting. Public goods require that citizens experience a short-term loss (of their contribution) in order to realize a long-term gain (of the good). However, because everyone can use the good once it is provided, there is also an incentive to not contribute, let others give, and then take advantage of their efforts. This state of affairs introduces a conflict between doing what is best for oneself and what is best for the group. In a public goods situation, cooperation and antagonism impact how one resolves this conflict. The other major type of need situation is a common-pool resource problem. Here, a good is fully provided at the outset, and citizens may sample from it. The resource is usually, but not necessarily, partially replenished. Examples of replenished resources are drinking water and trees; examples of resources that are functionally not replenished are oil and minerals. Common-pool resources allow citizens to experience a short-term gain (by getting what they want in the early life of the resource) but also present the possibility of a long-term loss (if the resource dries up). As with public goods, there is thus a conflict between, on the one hand, acting in one's best interest and taking as much as one wants all the time and, on the other, acting for the good of the group, which requires taking a lesser amount so that the replenishment rate can keep up with the rate of use. As with public goods, both cooperation and antagonism affect this decision. With these situations in mind, we can now dig deeply into the dynamics of both cooperation and antagonism. Cooperation is one of the most heavily studied aspects of human behavior, yet despite this attention, there is much that is not understood about it, including its fundamental base. There are a number of different perspectives on the base. Interdependence theory argues that cooperation is driven by how one interprets the subjective value of the outcomes that will result from various combinations of behaviors. A person who sees a potential result of "50 to you, 50 to me" as "We both would do well" is more likely to cooperate than the person who sees it as "I would not outgain the other person." Self-control theory suggests that cooperation is a function of how well a person can resist the impulse to benefit now and delay gratification. Evolutionary theory takes many forms but revolves around the extent to which cooperation is adaptive. Finally, the appropriateness framework takes a cognitive approach and assumes that cooperation is determined by a combination of social-cognitive (interpretation of self and the situation) and decision-heuristic factors. We propose that it is possible to integrate across these approaches and understand cooperation as a behavior that is influenced by all of these factors as well as other dynamics, such as cultural mores and personality traits. Antagonism, as it relates to the collective welfare, is a phenomenon with a lesser history but one that is clearly influential. A number of facets of antagonism are relevant. Power, and its abuse, is a major factor, and a specific application to collective goods is the notion of a "gatekeeper," or a person who can completely determine whether a public good exists or a common-pool resource can be used. Gatekeepers tend to demand ample compensation from others in…
Social ties in a public good experiment
Journal of Public Economics, 2002
The formation of social ties is examined in an experimental study of voluntary public good provision. The experiment consists of three parts. In the first part the value orientation (attitude to a generalized other) is measured. In the second part couples play 25 periods of a public good game. In the third part the attitudes of subjects to their partners in the public good game is measured. The concept of a social tie is operationalized as the difference between the measurements in the first and third parts. Evidence for the occurrence of social ties is found. These ties depend on the success of the interaction in the public good game.
Rationality and Society, 2013
It is argued that trust and positive social preferences promote public goods production. However, public goods produced by any in-group may have favourable or unfavourable consequences for out-groups (called ‘benign’ and ‘malignant’ public goods, respectively). I develop a theoretical model of heterogeneous reciprocity preferences and report two experiments relating trust, social preferences and in-group bias to contributions to benign and malignant public goods. The results allow four general conclusions: (i) contributions to benign public goods are (weakly) higher than contributions to malignant ones; (ii) general trust is at best weakly related to contributions to both types of public goods; (iii) the expectation that others contribute is positively related to contributions to both types of public goods; and (iv) social preferences are positively related to contributions to benign public goods and unrelated to contributions to malignant public goods, while in-group bias is negati...
An experimental inquiry into the nature of relational goods, and their impact on cooperation
POLIS Working Papers, 2014
Our experiment aims at studying the impact of two types of relational goods on the voluntary contributions to the production of a public good, i.e. acquaintance among the contributors and having performed a common work before the experiment. We implement two treatments with 128 participants from two different groups. In the first treatment the subjects are left talking in a room before the experiment (cheap talk treatment); they are not suggested any particular topic to talk about, nor are they requested to perform any activity in particular. The second treatment involves the performance of a common work (namely, the computation of some indices of economic performance of three companies, based on their balance sheets). The two groups of subjects are composed either by people with or without previous acquaintance. An equal number of subjects from each of these groups is then allocated to either treatment. After that the subjects played a standard 10-rounds public goods game in groups of 4. The groups were genderhomogeneous. This allows us also to inquire for the possible presence of a gender effect in our experiment. Our results show that: 1) both common work and previous acquaintance increase the average contribution to the public good, 2) there is a relevant gender effect with women contributing more or less than men, depending on the treatment. Therefore, we conclude that relational goods are important to enhance cooperation, that acquaintance and working together are rather complements than substitutes, and that different relational goods produce different effects on cooperation. Also, we find further evidence for women's behaviour to be more context-specific than men's.
ECONOMICS & SOCIOLOGY, 2015
Social capital in the form of informal norms and networks of social relationships is an intrinsic element of any society and influences the effectiveness of its economy. For this reason, it is important to understand the relation between individuals’ social capital and the behaviour they express in social and economic interactions. Two important elements of social capital are generalised trust and norms of reciprocation. Hence, this article presents results from a study designed to investigate the level of generalised trust and reciprocation among Polish students. In previous studies, a positive answer to the trust question: “Do you believe that the majority of people can be trusted?”, has been shown to be associated with cooperative behaviour in the Public Goods Game. Our questionnaire included two novel questions aimed at elucidating students’ opinions about what sort of behaviour is most likely to bring success and whether such behaviour is in line with their own outlook. The results of the study presented here indicate that the answer to thefirst question is a better predictor of behaviour in the two games considered here than the answer to the trust question and one of the possible answers to this question can be interpreted as an expression of generalised trust. Also, when taken together, the answers to these two questions give a more subtle picture of individuals’ trust in the general public and institutions.
A Research on Asymmetric Inter Group Cooperation--A Lab Experiment with Two Global Public Goods
Proceedings of the 2nd Annual International Conference on Social Science and Contemporary Humanity Development, 2016
We accomplished a linear public goods experiment to study the effects of extrinsic reciprocity, via comparing a setting where subjects have the same income with a setting where they differ. We find that: 1) The contribution is higher in the two global public goods treatment than in the single global public goods experiment; 2) The subjects contribute more to the local public goods than to the global public goods; 3) When MPCR (marginal per capita return) is heterogeneous, members have a stronger will to contribute to the public goods; 4) In a certain range, the greater the gap between MPCR the more conducive to the overall public goods contribution. Our findings suggest that policy interventions may be necessary to improving intergroup cooperation with heterogeneous income and multiple public goods.
The Seeds of Success: The Pivotal Role of First Round Cooperation in Public Goods Games
Journal of the Economic Science Association, 2024
This paper examines cooperation and punishment in a public goods game in Istanbul. Unlike prior within-subject designs, we use a between-subject design with separate no-punishment and punishment conditions. This approach reveals that punishment significantly increases contributions, demonstrating the detrimental effect of having prior experience without sanctions. We highlight two critical factors-heterogeneous initial contributions across groups and how subjects update their contributions based on prior contributions and received punishment. An agent-based model verifies that the interaction between these two factors leads to a strong persistence of contributions over time. Analysis of related data from comparable cities shows similar patterns, suggesting our findings likely generalize if using a between-subject design. We conclude that overlooking within-group heterogeneity biases cross-society comparisons and subsequent policy implications.