Transfers and the effect of monitoring in an overlapping-generations experiment

Abstract

Transfers and the effect of monitoring in an overlapping-generations experiment van der Heijden, Eline; Nelissen, J.H.M.; Potters, Jan; Verbon, Harrie General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.-Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research -You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain -You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright, please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. AbstractWe experimentally investigate the argument that the establishment and maintenance of an intergenerational transfer system is related to cross-generational monitoring. In our overlapping-generations experiment transfers are induced to be collectively efficient, but individually suboptimal. Varying the information conditions allows us to study the relationship between the level and development of voluntary transfers, on the one hand, and the possibility for cross-generational monitoring and rewarding and punishing, on the other hand. The experimental results give little support for the importance of monitoring, Nevertheless, a fairly efficient level of transfers is observed. The results suggest that the public good feature of the setting is more important than the bargaining feature, which would require intertemporal rewards and punishments. 0 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classification: C90; D63; H55

Political Preferences and the Aging of Populations

“…Finally, some empirical experiments have been conducted to test these ideas (see van der Heijden et al (1998)). The results hardly provide any evidence for rewards and punishments.…”

“…(van der Heijden et al (1998Heijden et al ( ): 1383 and that other factors must also be at work. As the next subsection shows, majority voting combined with altruism or intra-generational heterogeneity could potentially offer a more forceful explanation of why public pension systems are politically sustained.…”

Can Exit Prizes Induce Lame Ducks to Shirk Less? Experimental Evidence

“…Notable exceptions include Van der Heijden et al (1998) andO¤erman andVerbon (2001). Both of these experiments consider a game with two players per period, in which only the newborn player takes an action.…”

“…In keeping with the two mentioned studies, the subjects in our experiment face a binary choice (contribute vs. not contribute). Van der Heijden et al (1998) study the impact of the game's information structure on contribution levels and on the variability of contributions. They …nd that knowledge of the game's history explains neither the level of contributions nor their variability.…”

“…Van der Heijden et al (1998) use a …xed and publicly known last period. Because of this the cooperative outcome cannot be sustained as an equilibrium, which implies serious problems for studying the impact of trigger strategies.…”