Partner Selection in Public Goods Experiments

Abstract

Founded in 1963 by two prominent Austrians living in exile-the sociologist Paul F. Lazarsfeld and the economist Oskar Morgenstern-with the financial support from the Ford Foundation, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education and the City of Vienna, the Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS) is the first institution for postgraduate education and research in economics and the social sciences in Austria. The Economics Series presents research done at the Department of Economics and Finance and aims to share "work in progress" in a timely way before formal publication. As usual, authors bear full responsibility for the content of their contributions. Das Institut für Höhere Studien (IHS) wurde im Jahr 1963 von zwei prominenten Exilösterreicherndem Soziologen Paul F. Lazarsfeld und dem Ökonomen Oskar Morgenstern-mit Hilfe der Ford-Stiftung, des Österreichischen Bundesministeriums für Unterricht und der Stadt Wien gegründet und ist somit die erste nachuniversitäre Lehr-und Forschungsstätte für die Sozial-und Wirtschaftswissenschaften in Österreich. Die Reihe Ökonomie bietet Einblick in die Forschungsarbeit der Abteilung für Ökonomie und Finanzwirtschaft und verfolgt das Ziel, abteilungsinterne Diskussionsbeiträge einer breiteren fachinternen Öffentlichkeit zugänglich zu machen. Die inhaltliche Verantwortung für die veröffentlichten Beiträge liegt bei den Autoren und Autorinnen.

Pledges of Commitment and Cooperation in Partnerships

“…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.…”

Leave and let leave: A sufficient condition to explain the evolutionary emergence of cooperation

“…See below a similar point concerning related literature. 5 Further interesting examples where conditional dissociation or an exit option has been shown to promote cooperation in networks are Pacheco et al (2006), Santos et al (2006) and, in experimental studies, Boone and Macy (1999), Coricelli et al (2004), or Hauk and Nagel (2001). Also related is the study of continuous-action social dilemmas where there is a co-evolution of a player's level of contribution to the partnership and the minimum contribution she requires from her partner in order not to break the partnership (McNamara et al, 2008;Sherratt and Roberts, 1998).…”

Endogenous Group Formation

“…However, the decreasing MPCR in a group as the number of members increases seems to confound a clear interpretation of the data at least without a complementary control series in which MPCR is constant with group size. Concern, Fehr, and Fellner (2003) allows subjects in a public goods setting to choose partners according to two different mechanisms, bidirectional and unidirectional, and find that contribution levels do vary significantly based on the mechanism used.…”

“…As a starting point for investigating these issues, we implement different mechanisms in which entry into or exit from a group requires approval of a majority of the incumbent group members. Thus, as in Coricelli, Fehr, and Fellner (2003), we experimentally compare how different group formation rules impact behavior, but we do this in the context in which group sizes are endogenous, not fixed.…”