Institution Formation in Public Goods Games

Kosfeld, Michael; Okada, Akira; Riedl, Arno

doi:10.1257/aer.99.4.1335

Cited by 338 publications

(325 citation statements)

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“…The results show that many groups quickly implement sanctions that induce efficient outcomes. Kosfeld, Okada, and Riedl (2009) analyze the choice for automatically executed punishment mechanism which may govern only a subset of players. They show that participants are unwilling to implement equilibrium punishment which allows some players to free-ride.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information-sensitive Leviathans

Nicklisch

Grechenig

Thöni

2016

Journal of Public Economics

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Abstract We study information conditions under which individuals are willing to delegate their sanctioning power to a central authority. We design a public goods game in which players can move between institutional environments, and we vary the observability of others' contributions. We find that the relative popularity of centralized sanctioning crucially depends on the interaction between the observability of the cooperation of others and the absence of punishment targeted at cooperative individuals. While central institutions do not outperform decentralized sanctions under perfect information, large parts of the population are attracted by central institutions that rarely punish cooperative individuals in environments with limited observability. Terms of use: Documents in

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information-sensitive Leviathans

Nicklisch

Grechenig

Thöni

2016

Journal of Public Economics

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“…Barrett (2002) and Finus and Maus (2008) show that coalitions with modest ambitions may be more successful than those that try to fully internalize damages. Kosfeld et al (2009), Burger and Kolstad (2009) and Dannenberg et al (2009) use laboratory experiments to test the predictions of this participation game.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

International Environmental Agreements with mixed strategies and investment

Hong

Karp

2012

Journal of Public Economics

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We modify a canonical participation game used to study International Environmental Agreements (IEA), considering both mixed and pure strategies at the participation stage, and including a prior cost-reducing investment stage. The use of mixed strategies at the participation stage reverses a familiar result and also reverses the policy implication of that result: with mixed strategies, equilibrium participation and welfare is higher in equilibria that involve higher investment.

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“…Recently, this problem has been the subject of an intensive methodological debate about the role of laboratory experiments in economic research (see, e.g., Levitt and List, 2007;Falk and Heckman, 2009;List, 2009;Bardsley et al, 2010;Croson and Gaechter, 1 Social preferences have been formalized in terms of inequity aversion (Fehr and Schmidt, 1999;Bolton and Ockenfels, 2000), fairness intention (Rabin, 1993;Dufwenberg and Kirchsteiger, 2004;Falk and Fischbacher, 2006), type-based reciprocity (Levine, 1998), preferences for social welfare (Charness and Rabin, 2002), and concerns for social reputation or self-respect (Benabou and Tirole, 2006;Ellingsen and Johannesson, 2007). These theories proved to be helpful in organizing the data and have been applied to many important economic questions such as contract theory (Fehr et al, 2007;Bartling and von Siemens, 2010), the role of fairness in the process of institution formation (Kosfeld et al, 2009), the analysis of bargaining outcomes (Goeree and Holt, 2000), or the examination of counterproductive incentive effects (Benabou and Tirole, 2006;Ellingsen andJohannesson, 2007, 2008). 2010; Henrich et al, 2010). The most prominent arguments against the generalizability of laboratory findings include concerns about low monetary stakes, self-selected student participants, short examinations periods, and high degrees of scrutiny.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Big experimenter is watching you! Anonymity and prosocial behavior in the laboratory

Barmettler

Fehr

Zehnder

2012

Games and Economic Behavior

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Social preference research has received considerable attention in recent years. Researchers have demonstrated that the presence of people with other-regarding preferences can have important implications in many economic dimensions. However, it is important to be aware of the fact that the empirical basis of this literature relies to a large extent on experiments that do not provide anonymity between experimenter and subject. It has been argued that this lack of experimenter-subject anonymity may create selfish incentives to engage in seemingly other-regarding behavior. If this were the case these experiments would overestimate the importance of social preferences. Previous studies provide mixed results and methodological differences within and across studies make it difficult to isolate the impact of experimenter-subject anonymity on prosocial behavior. In this paper we use a novel procedure that allows us to examine the impact of the exact same ceteris-paribus variation in anonymity on behavior in three of the most commonly used games in the social preference literature. Our data reveals that introducing experimenter-subject anonymity has only minor, insignificant, effects on prosocial behavior.

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Institution Formation in Public Goods Games

Cited by 338 publications

References 42 publications

Information-sensitive Leviathans

Information-sensitive Leviathans

International Environmental Agreements with mixed strategies and investment

Big experimenter is watching you! Anonymity and prosocial behavior in the laboratory

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