Third parties promote cooperative norms in repeated interactions

From good institutions to generous citizens: Top-down incentives to cooperate promote subsequent prosociality but not norm enforcement

“…Our findings, as well as other work using peer-based reputational incentives (Nakashima et al, 2016; Peysakhovich & Rand, 2016), run counter to the large body of evidence regarding “crowding out” effects, whereby internal drives to achieve some goal can be supplanted by external incentives which are unrelated to the initial relationship between goal and natural (intrinsic) reward (Deci et al, 1999). Such effects have been specifically demonstrated in the context of prosociality (Frey & Jegen, 2001), raising the question of why we did not observe evidence of top-down institutional punishment of selfishness crowding out subsequent DG prosociality in Study 2.…”

“…The results provide clear evidence of spillover effects: participants randomized into the low accountability condition for the PD games in the first stage were substantially less likely to engage in pure cooperation, or to punish selfishness, in the one-shot anonymous games of the second stage. Further evidence in this vein comes from an experiment where third party observers could pay to intervene and thereby reduce the payoff of defectors and increase the payoff of cooperators (Nakashima, Halali, & Halevy, 2016). Intervention was found to increase cooperation, and when intervention was possible only in the first half of the game, the increased cooperation carried over into the second intervention-free half of the game.…”

Brokerage and Brokering: An Integrative Review and Organizing Framework for Third Party Influence

“…Integrating knowledge dispersed across many employees and connecting disconnected employees in the knowledge network to promote inventive output Grigoriou and Rothaermel (2014) Facilitating interactions between different role holders (e.g., performers, personal managers, songwriters, musicians, and studio executives) to produce music Lingo and O'Mahony (2010) Using incentives to motivate cooperative behavior, thereby cultivating enduring norms of cooperation that outlast the intervention period Nakashima et al (2017) Acting as hostile mediators, who mistreat disputants with rudeness and hostility, to facilitate a sense of common fate and consequently collaboration among disputants Zhang et al (2017) Harmful brokers Engaging in negative gossip to promote ostracism and compel a particular individual who does not follow group norms to leave the group Kniffin and Wilson (2005) Creating a work environment that undercuts a highly skilled subordinate's opportunities to communicate and cooperate with other group members Case and Maner (2014) Mixing employees with incompatible interests in the same work unit to promote friction and subgrouping and avoid unionization Posner et al (2010) Promoting fear and distrust within a workforce and using threats of targeted layoffs or general downsizing to undermine collective efforts to unionize Dundon (2002) Reinforcers Transferring information between alters as a conduit without attempting to change alters' relationship…”

“…Our own research has examined both third parties' willingness to use the resources they control to incentivize cooperative behavior in conflict situations and disputants' reactions to the possibility of such third-party intervention (Halevy & Halali, 2015;Nakashima, Halali, & Halevy, 2017). To experimentally study triadic interactions, we created a group decision-making task called the Peacemaker Game, in which two disputants choose whether to cooperate or compete, and a third party chooses whether or not to introduce side payments that reward cooperative behavior and punish competitive behavior.…”

“…Finally, the third hypothesis proposed that third parties who intervene early in the course of the repeated interaction would promote the development of sustainable cooperative norms that would outlast the intervention period. That is, it predicted that even after the third party can no longer incentivize cooperation, the disputants would continue to cooperate at high levels (Nakashima et al, 2017).…”