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Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiments
- AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW
, 2000
"... This paper provides evidence that free riders are heavily punished even if punishment is costly and does not provide any material benefits for the punisher. The more free riders negatively deviate from the group standard the more they are punished. As a consequence, the existence of an opportunity f ..."
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Cited by 485 (36 self)
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This paper provides evidence that free riders are heavily punished even if punishment is costly and does not provide any material benefits for the punisher. The more free riders negatively deviate from the group standard the more they are punished. As a consequence, the existence of an opportunity for costly punishment causes a large increase in cooperation levels because potential free riders face a credible threat. We show, in particular, that in the presence of a costly punishment opportunity almost complete cooperation can be achieved and maintained although, under the standard assumptions of rationality and selfishness, there should be no cooperation at all. We also show that free riding causes strong negative emotions among cooperators. The intensity of these emotions is the stronger the more the free riders deviate from the group standard. Our results provide, therefore, support for the hypothesis that emotions are guarantors of credible threats.
DO WOMEN SHY AWAY FROM COMPETITION? DO MEN COMPETE TOO MUCH?*
, 2006
"... We examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment. Participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task, first under a non-competitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme. Although there are no gender differen ..."
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Cited by 274 (15 self)
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We examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment. Participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task, first under a non-competitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme. Although there are no gender differences in performance, men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance. While seventy-three percent of the men select the tournament only thirty-five percent of the women make this choice. This gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only play a negligible role. Instead the tournament-entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition. The result is that women shy away from competition and men embrace it. * We thank Scott Kinross, who conducted all the experiments reported in this paper, for his excellent research assistance. We thank the editors and the referees who helped us improve the paper. We also
Social preferences, beliefs, and the dynamics of free riding in public good experiments
, 2009
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Third-party punishment and social norms
, 2004
"... We examine the characteristics and relative strength of third-party sanctions in a series of experiments. We hypothesize that egalitarian distribution norms and cooperation norms apply in our experiments, and that third parties, whose economic payoff is unaffected by the norm violation, may be willi ..."
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Cited by 123 (4 self)
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We examine the characteristics and relative strength of third-party sanctions in a series of experiments. We hypothesize that egalitarian distribution norms and cooperation norms apply in our experiments, and that third parties, whose economic payoff is unaffected by the norm violation, may be willing to enforce these norms although the enforcement is costly for them. Almost two-thirds of the third parties indeed punished the violation of the distribution norm and their punishment increased the more the norm was violated. Likewise, up to roughly 60 % of the third parties punished violations of the cooperation norm. Thus, our results show that the notion of strong reciprocity extends to the sanctioning behavior of ‘‘unaffected’’ third parties. In addition, these experiments suggest that thirdparty punishment games are powerful tools for studying the characteristics and the content of social norms. Further experiments indicate that second parties, whose economic payoff is reduced by the norm violation, punish the violation much more strongly than do third parties.
Do Women Shy Away from Competition
- Do Men Compete Too Much?” Quarterly Journal of Economics
"... Competitive high ranking positions are largely occupied by men, and women remain scarce in engineering and sciences. Explanations for these occupational differences focus on discrimination and preferences for work hours and field of study. We explore an additional explanation, namely that women and ..."
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Cited by 104 (7 self)
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Competitive high ranking positions are largely occupied by men, and women remain scarce in engineering and sciences. Explanations for these occupational differences focus on discrimination and preferences for work hours and field of study. We explore an additional explanation, namely that women and men may differ in their selection into competitive environments. Men and women in a laboratory experiment perform a real task under a non-competitive piece rate and a competitive tournament scheme. Although there are no gender differences in performance under either of these compensations, there is a substantial gender difference when participants subsequently choose the scheme they want to apply to their next performance. Twice as many men as women choose the tournament over the piece rate. This gender gap in tournament entry is neither explained by performance before nor after the entry decision. Furthermore, while men are more optimistic about their relative performance, differences in beliefs only explain a small share of the gap in tournament entry. In a final task, we find that women are less likely to select tournament compensations even when they select it for past performance. In predicting tournament entry we use the compensation choice for past performance as a control for non-tournament specific gender differences (such as risk aversion, general feedback aversion and overconfidence), and we find a large residual gender effect.
The Online Laboratory: Conducting Experiments in a Real Labor Market. SSRN eLibrary
, 2010
"... Online labor markets have great potential as platforms for conducting experiments. They provide immediate access to a large and diverse subject pool, and allow researchers to control the experimental context. Online experiments, we show, can be just as valid—both internally and externally—as laborat ..."
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Cited by 102 (4 self)
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Online labor markets have great potential as platforms for conducting experiments. They provide immediate access to a large and diverse subject pool, and allow researchers to control the experimental context. Online experiments, we show, can be just as valid—both internally and externally—as laboratory and field experiments, while often requiring far less money and time to design and conduct. To demonstrate their value, we use an online labor market to replicate three classic experiments. The first finds quantitative agreement between levels of cooperation in a prisoner’s dilemma played online and in the physical laboratory. The second shows – consistent with behavior in the traditional laboratory – that online subjects respond to priming by altering their choices. The third demonstrates that when an identical decision is framed differently, individuals reverse their choice, thus replicating a famed Tversky-Kahneman result. Then we conduct a field experiment showing that workers have upwardsloping labor supply curves. Finally, we analyze the challenges to online experiments, proposing methods to cope with the unique threats to validity in an online setting, and examining the conceptual issues surrounding the external validity of online results. We conclude by presenting our views on the potential role that online experiments can play within the social sciences, and then recommend software development priorities and best practices. ∗Thanks to Alex Breinin and Xiaoqi Zhu for excellent research assistance. Thanks to
2007): A Within-Subject Analysis of Other-Regarding Preferences
"... We assess the predictive power of a model of other-regarding preferences, inequality aversion, using a within-subjects design. We run four different experiments (ultima-tum game, dictator game, sequential prisoner’s dilemma and public-good game) with the same sample of subjects. From the data we est ..."
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Cited by 82 (8 self)
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We assess the predictive power of a model of other-regarding preferences, inequality aversion, using a within-subjects design. We run four different experiments (ultima-tum game, dictator game, sequential prisoner’s dilemma and public-good game) with the same sample of subjects. From the data we estimate parameters of aversion to disadvantageous and advantageous inequality. We then use these estimates to test several hypotheses across games. Our data show that results from within-subject tests can differ markedly from aggregate-level analysis. Inequality-aversion has predictive power at the aggregate level but performs less well at the individual level. The model seems to be able to capture different behavioral motives in different games but a low correlation of these motives within subjects appears to cause failure at the individual level.
Group Identity and Social Preferences
, 2007
"... Identity is a central concept in the social sciences. In this study, we present a laboratory experiment that measures the effects of induced group identity on participant social preferences. We find that when participants are matched with an ingroup member (as opposed to an outgroup member) they sho ..."
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Cited by 80 (4 self)
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Identity is a central concept in the social sciences. In this study, we present a laboratory experiment that measures the effects of induced group identity on participant social preferences. We find that when participants are matched with an ingroup member (as opposed to an outgroup member) they show a 47 % increase in charity concerns when they have a higher payoff and a 93 % decrease in envy when they have a lower payoff. Likewise, participants are 22 % more likely to reward an ingroup match for good behavior, but 13 % less likely to punish an ingroup match for misbehavior. Furthermore, participants are significantly more likely to choose social-welfare-maximizing actions when matched with an ingroup member. All results are consistent with the hypothesis that participants are more altruistic towards an ingroup match. As a result, ingroup matching generates significantly higher expected earnings than outgroup matching.
Reciprocity, culture, and human cooperation: Previous insights and a new cross-cultural experiment
- PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B – BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
, 2009
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On the Nature of Fair Behavior
- Falk, Armin and Fischbacher, Urs. “A Theory of Reciprocity.” Games and Economic Behavior
, 1999
"... This paper shows that identical offers in an ultimatum game generate systematically different rejection rates depending on the other offers that are available to the proposer. This result casts doubt on the consequentialist practice in economics to define the utility of an action solely in terms of ..."
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Cited by 79 (3 self)
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This paper shows that identical offers in an ultimatum game generate systematically different rejection rates depending on the other offers that are available to the proposer. This result casts doubt on the consequentialist practice in economics to define the utility of an action solely in terms of the consequences of the action irrespective of the set of alternatives. It means, in particular, that negatively reciprocal behavior cannot be fully captured by equity models that are exclusively based on preferences over the distribution of material payoffs. Models that take into account players' fairness intentions and distributional preferences are consistent with our data while models that focus exclusively on intentions or on the distribution of material payoffs are not. JEL-Classification: D63, C78, C91. Keywords: Fairness, reciprocity, intentions, experiments, ultimatum game. * Financial support by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Project 1214-05100.97) and by the MacArthur Foundation (Network on Economic Environments and the Evolution of Individual Preferences and Social Norms) is gratefully acknowledged. This paper is part of the EU-TMR Research Network ENDEAR (FMRX-CTP98-0238). ** Postal address: Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, Blmlisalpstrasse 10, CH-8006 Zurich. E-mail: falk@iew.unizh.ch, efehr@iew.unizh.ch, fiba@iew.unizh.ch. WWW: http://www.iew.unizh.ch/grp/fehr. 2 1.
