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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Money And The Scale Of Cooperation, Maria Bigoni, Gabriele Camera, Marco Casari
Money And The Scale Of Cooperation, Maria Bigoni, Gabriele Camera, Marco Casari
ESI Working Papers
This study reveals the existence of a causal link between the availability of money and an expanded scale of interaction. We constructed an experiment where participants chose the group size, either a low-value partnership or a high-value group of strangers, and then faced an intertemporal cooperative task. Theoretically, a monetary system was inessential to achieve cooperation. Empirically, without a working monetary system, participants were reluctant to expand the scale of interaction; and when they did, they ended up destroying surplus compared to partnerships, because cooperation collapsed in large groups. This economic failure was reversed only when participants managed to concurrently …
Selective Recognition: How To Recognize Donors To Increase Charitable Giving, Anya Samek, Roman Sheremeta
Selective Recognition: How To Recognize Donors To Increase Charitable Giving, Anya Samek, Roman Sheremeta
ESI Working Papers
Recognizing donors by revealing their identities is important for increasing charitable giving. We conducted a field experiment to examine how different recognition methods impact giving, and found that all forms of recognition that we examined had a positive impact on increasing donations, whereby recognizing only highest donors (positive recognition) and recognizing only lowest donors (negative recognition) had the most pronounced effect. We argue that selective recognition (both positive and negative) creates tournament-like incentives. Recognizing the highest donors activates the desire to seek a positive prize of prestige, thus increasing the proportion of donors who contribute large amounts. Recognizing the lowest …
Competition Between And Within Universities: Theoretical And Experimental Investigation Of Group Identity And The Desire To Win, Zhuoqiong Charlie Chen, David Ong, Roman M. Sheremeta
Competition Between And Within Universities: Theoretical And Experimental Investigation Of Group Identity And The Desire To Win, Zhuoqiong Charlie Chen, David Ong, Roman M. Sheremeta
ESI Working Papers
We study how salient group identity, created through competition between students from different universities, as well as differences in the value of winning impact competitive behavior. Our experiment employs a simple all-pay auction within and between two university subject pools. We find that when competing against their peers, students within the lower tier university bid more aggressively than students within the top-tier university. Also, students from the lower tier university, in particular women, bid more aggressively when competing against students from the top-tier university. These findings, interpreted through a theoretical model incorporating both group identity and differential value of winning, …
Asymmetric And Endogenous Within-Group Communication In Competitive Coordination Games, Timothy N. Cason, Roman Sheremeta, Jingjing Zhang
Asymmetric And Endogenous Within-Group Communication In Competitive Coordination Games, Timothy N. Cason, Roman Sheremeta, Jingjing Zhang
ESI Working Papers
Within-group communication in competitive coordination games has been shown to increase competition between groups and lower efficiency. This study further explores potentially harmful effects of communication, by addressing the questions of (i) asymmetric communication and (ii) the endogenous emergence of communication. Our theoretical analysis provides testable hypotheses regarding the effect of communication on competitive behavior and efficiency. We test these predictions using a laboratory experiment. The experiment shows that although asymmetric communication is not as harmful as symmetric communication, it leads to more aggressive competition and lower efficiency relative to the case when neither group can communicate. Moreover, groups vote …