. 35. A sea-level rise Dsl pushes the entire oceanic lithosphere down; thus, the resulting sea-level rise Dsl is less than the changing mean ocean basement depth Dh, which is computed without this effect. 36. P. L. Heller, C. L. Angevine, Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 75, 417 (1985). 37. G. C. Bond, Tectonophysics 61, 285 (1979 We document the widespread existence of antisocial punishment, that is, the sanctioning of people who behave prosocially. Our evidence comes from public goods experiments that we conducted in 16 comparable participant pools around the world. However, there is a huge cross-societal variation. Some participant pools punished the high contributors as much as they punished the low contributors, whereas in others people only punished low contributors. In some participant pools, antisocial punishment was strong enough to remove the cooperation-enhancing effect of punishment. We also show that weak norms of civic cooperation and the weakness of the rule of law in a country are significant predictors of antisocial punishment. Our results show that punishment opportunities are socially beneficial only if complemented by strong social norms of cooperation.
Does the cultural background influence the success with which genetically unrelated individuals cooperate in social dilemma situations? In this paper, we provide an answer by analysing the data of Herrmann et al. (2008a), who studied cooperation and punishment in 16 subject pools from six different world cultures (as classified by Inglehart & Baker (2000)). We use analysis of variance to disentangle the importance of cultural background relative to individual heterogeneity and grouplevel differences in cooperation. We find that culture has a substantial influence on the extent of cooperation, in addition to individual heterogeneity and group-level differences identified by previous research. The significance of this result is that cultural background has a substantial influence on cooperation in otherwise identical environments. This is particularly true in the presence of punishment opportunities.
We investigate the role of affect and deliberation on social preferences. In our laboratory experiment subjects decide on a series of mini Dictator games while they are under varying degrees of cognitive load. The cognitive load is intended to decrease deliberation and therefore enhance the influence of affect on behavior. In each game subjects have two options: they can decide between a fair or an unfair allocation. We find that subjects in a high-load condition are more generous-they more often choose the fair allocation than subjects in a low-load condition. The series of mini Dictator games also allows us to investigate how subjects react to the games' varying levels of advantageous inequality. Low-load subjects react considerably more to the degree of advantageous inequality. Our results therefore underscore the importance of affect for basic altruistic behavior and deliberation in adjusting decisions to a given situation.
Many people contribute to public goods but stop doing so once they experience free riding.We test the hypothesis that groups whose members know that they are composed only of 'like-minded' cooperators are able to maintain a higher cooperation level than the most cooperative, randomly-composed groups. Our experiments confirm this hypothesis. We also predict that groups of 'like-minded' free riders do not cooperate. Yet, we find a high level of strategic cooperation that eventually collapses. Our results underscore the importance of group composition and social learning by heterogeneously motivated agents to understand the dynamics of cooperation and free riding.
JEL classification: J31 J71 C91 C92 Keywords: Fair wage-effort hypothesis Wage comparison Gift exchange Horizontal fairness Wage discrimination Labor market experiments Strategy method Individual heterogeneity
a b s t r a c tWe investigate the impact of wage comparisons for worker productivity. We present three studies which all use three-person gift-exchange experiments. Consistent with Akerlof and Yellen's (1990) fair wage-effort hypothesis we find that disadvantageous wage discrimination leads to lower efforts while advantageous wage discrimination does not increase efforts on average. Two studies allow us to measure wage comparison effects at the individual level. We observe strongly heterogeneous wage comparison effects. We also find that reactions to wage discrimination can be attributed to the underlying intentions of discrimination rather than to payoff consequences.
a b s t r a c tRecent research on behavioral heterogeneity in social dilemma situations has increasingly focused on exploring the predictive value of individual difference variables. This paper contributes to this line of research by examining how cooperation preferences in a series of three public goods games conducted over the course of five months are related to personality traits and personal values. A variant of the four player one-shot public goods game was administered to classify participants' cooperation preferences, along with measures of the Big-Five personality dimensions and Rokeach's terminal values. Results revealed that, when considered independently, Agreeableness and prosocial values were indicative of individual preferences for cooperation. However, when considered simultaneously, only Agreeableness emerged as a significant predictor of cooperation preferences. The findings are interpreted in terms of how personality and personal values jointly impact economic behavior.
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