Cost asymmetry and incomplete information in a volunteer’s dilemma experiment

Healy, Andrew; Pate, Jennifer

doi:10.1007/s00355-018-1124-6

Cited by 14 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Although the observation of diffusion of responsibility in different types of volunteering situations is very robust [20,30], there are also exceptions. Here we argue that observable asymmetries of the bystanders in terms of their costs of and/or benefits from intervening may account for these exceptions (see also [47,64,65]). To test this conjecture, we model the volunteering situation as a symmetric and asymmetric volunteer’s dilemma game (VOD), derive hypotheses about the moderating effect of asymmetry on the diffusion of responsibility in social norm enforcement, and test our predictions in a computerized lab experiment.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Heterogeneous groups overcome the diffusion of responsibility problem in social norm enforcement

Przepiorka

Diekmann

2018

PLoS ONE

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Social norms promote cooperation in everyday life because many people are willing to negatively sanction norm breakers at a cost to themselves. However, a norm violation may persist if only one person is required to sanction the norm breaker and everyone expects someone else to do it. Here we employ the volunteer’s dilemma game (VOD) to model this diffusion of responsibility in social norm enforcement. The symmetric VOD is a binary choice game in which all actors have the same costs of and benefits from cooperation and only one actor’s cooperation is required to provide the collective good for the group. The asymmetric VOD differs from the symmetric VOD in one (strong) actor having lower costs of cooperation. In a laboratory experiment, we find that, in line with the diffusion of responsibility hypothesis, subjects’ propensities to sanction the norm breaker decrease with group size in the symmetric VOD. In the asymmetric VOD, groups tacitly coordinate on the strong subject to sanction the norm breaker alone. Although at first lower in larger groups, strong subjects’ sanctioning rates increase over time and reach equally high levels across different group sizes. Our results show that heterogeneous groups can be more effective in achieving norm compliance than groups of all equals because they naturally evade diffusion of responsibility in social norm enforcement.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Heterogeneous groups overcome the diffusion of responsibility problem in social norm enforcement

Przepiorka

Diekmann

2018

PLoS ONE

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“…Note that any participant's decision to cooperate immediately solves the coordination problem. Existing experimental work on the static Volunteer's Dilemma focuses on the theoretical predictions that group size decreases volunteering and the probability that no member of the group volunteers (Diekmann 1993;Franzen 1995;Goeree, Holt, and Smith 2017;Healy and Pate 2009;Murnighan, Kim, and Metzger 1993). Recent work has also investigated the distribution of player types (Bergstrom, Garratt, and Leo 2015) and mechanisms to allow flexible turn taking (Leo 2014).…”

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confidence: 99%

Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability

Babcock

Recalde

Vesterlund

et al. 2017

American Economic Review

447

249

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Gender differences in task allocationsDespite significant female educational advances, we continue to see gender differences in labor market outcomes (Goldin, Katz, and Kuziemko 2006; Bertrand, Goldin, and Katz 2010). Particularly striking is the persistent vertical gender segregation (Altonji and Blank 1999; Bertrand and Hallock 2001). To better understand the process by which men and women advance in the workplace, researchers have begun to examine whether the tasks that they perform at work vary, and whether such differences contribute to differences in advancement.Of particular interest is whether, relative to men, women spend less time on tasks that are likely to influence their performance evaluations (high-promotability tasks) and more time on tasks that, while benefiting the organization, are less likely to affect their evaluation and career advancement (low-promotability tasks). For example, in industry, revenue-generating tasks may be seen as more promotable than

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“…There typically exists a substantial degree of uncertainty about the costs of volunteering. This is particularly important in bigger organisations, since people tend to volunteer less in larger groups in the presence of cost uncertainty (Weesie 1994, Healy andPate 2018). The variation in costs in our experiment naturally arises from our field setting, in which workers vary in skill and/or opportunity costs of completing the task.…”

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confidence: 99%

Volunteering at the Workplace under Incomplete Information: Teamsize Does Not Matter

2020

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Volunteering is a widespread allocation mechanism at the workplace and emerges naturally in open-source software development, the generation of online knowledge platforms, and to some extent in "agile" work environments. Using a field experiment with 8 treatments and close to 2,800 workers on an online labor market, we study the effect of team size on volunteering at the workplace under incomplete information. In stark contrast to the theoretical predictions, we find no effect of team size on volunteering behavior. With the use of our control treatments, we can show that workers react to free-riding incentives provided by the volunteering setting in general, but do not react strategically to the team size. We show that the result is robust to several further factors. 1 Introduction Volunteering is an important feature of the fundamental organization of firms. In various situations, tasks and resources are not allocated among employees by some supervisor, but rather employees have to solve the allocation process by themselves. We argue that in those situations volunteering arises frequently in an organizational context. Consider, for example,

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Cost asymmetry and incomplete information in a volunteer’s dilemma experiment

Cited by 14 publications

References 19 publications

Heterogeneous groups overcome the diffusion of responsibility problem in social norm enforcement

Heterogeneous groups overcome the diffusion of responsibility problem in social norm enforcement

Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability

Volunteering at the Workplace under Incomplete Information: Teamsize Does Not Matter

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