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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Endogenous Group Formation Via Unproductive Costs, Jason A. Aimone, Laurence R. Iannaccone, Michael D. Makowsky, Jared Rubin
Endogenous Group Formation Via Unproductive Costs, Jason A. Aimone, Laurence R. Iannaccone, Michael D. Makowsky, Jared Rubin
Economics Faculty Articles and Research
Sacrifice is widely believed to enhance cooperation in churches, communes, gangs, clans, military units, and many other groups. We find that sacrifice can also work in the lab, apart from special ideologies, identities, or interactions. Our subjects play a modified VCM game—one in which they can voluntarily join groups that provide reduced rates of return on private investment. This leads to both endogenous sorting (because free-riders tend to reject the reduced-rate option) and substitution (because reduced private productivity favours increased club involvement). Seemingly unproductive costs thus serve to screen out free-riders, attract conditional cooperators, boost club production, and increase member …
Religious Identity And The Provision Of Public Goods: Evidence From The Indian Princely States, Latika Chaudhary, Jared Rubin
Religious Identity And The Provision Of Public Goods: Evidence From The Indian Princely States, Latika Chaudhary, Jared Rubin
ESI Working Papers
Religious identity affects preferences and can consequently affect policy. We propose two mechanisms through which a ruler's religious identity can affect public good provision: i) greater provision of goods in regions where more subjects are the ruler's co-religionists, and ii) lower provision of goods where private markets provide a substitute to the ruler's co-religionists. Empirically, identifying the causal effect of religious identity on policy is often impossible, since the religious identity of rulers rarely changes over time and place. We address this problem by exploiting the variation in the religion of rulers in the Indian Princely States in the early …