Voluntary Association in Public Goods Experiments: Reciprocity, Mimicry, and Efficiency

Abstract

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Pledges of Commitment and Cooperation in Partnerships

“…6 Subjects rank potential partners by typing a number into a box next to the information about each of them. This preference-based regrouping follows [8] and [7]. 7 See [11] for a discussion of the performance stable marriage mechanism in a linear VCM with endogenous regrouping.…”

“…1 The review articles [2,3] provides excellent surveys of the existing literature on public goods game experiments and various modifications that aid or hinder sustaining cooperation in this environment. 2 Previous studies of endogenous group formation [4][5][6][7][8] find that the introduction of endogenous group formation increases cooperation and welfare when compared to exogenous regrouping protocols (see [9] for an exception to this result). Our focus is different: we ask whether the addition of pledges of commitment in an endogenous group formation setting can provide additional increases in cooperation and welfare.…”

Team production benefits from a permanent fear of exclusion

“…Cinyabuguma et al (2005) and Maier-Rigaud et al (2010) started with a larger group and allowed group members to vote to exclude their fellow group members for the remainder of the given part (or for a subsequent game as in Masclet, 2003). Charness and Yang (2010), Ahn et al (2008) and Page et al (2005) had smaller groups and let them endogenously decide about groupformation, viz. by forced or voluntary exit and mergers in the first two, and by ranking others in the latter.…”

Sorting and sustaining cooperation

“…In teams that are already formed, managers may try to separate out free riders from the group in order to improve work morale, for example by firing the "bad apples" (Bewley 1999). If group formation is endogenous, sorting can again promote cooperation by allowing cooperative people who identify each other to work together (Page, Putterman and Unel 2005). For example, employees may be able to change the composition of a self-managed team by forcing out those who shirk (Barker 1993).…”