Short- & long-term effects of monetary and non-monetary incentives to cooperate in public good games: An experiment.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Lefebvre M
PROVIDER: S-EPMC6968839 | biostudies-literature | 2020
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:This paper addresses the question of the effectiveness and permanence of temporary incentives to contribute to a public good. Using a common experimental framework, we investigate the effects of a recommendation that takes the form of an exhortative message to contribute, a monetary punishment and a non-monetary reward to sustain high levels of contributions. In particular, we shed light on the differential impact these mechanisms have on heterogeneous types of agents. The results show that all three incentives increase contributions compared to a pre-phase where there is no incentive. Monetary sanctions lead to the highest contributions, but a sudden drop in contributions is observed once the incentive to punish is removed. On the contrary, Recommendation leads to the lowest contributions but maintains a long-lasting impact in the Post-policy phase. In particular, it makes free-riders increase their contribution over time in the post-incentive phase. Finally, non-monetary reward backfires against those who are weakly conditional cooperators. Our findings emphasize the importance of designing and maintaining incentives not only for free-riders, but for strong and weak conditional cooperators as well, depending on characteristics of the incentives.
| S-EPMC9409558 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Cooperation declines in repeated public good games because individuals behave as conditional cooperators. This is because individuals imitate the social behaviour of successful individuals when their payoff information is available. However, in human societies, individuals cooperate in many situations involving social dilemmas. We hypothesize that humans are sensitive to both success (payoffs) and how that success was obtained, by cheating (not socially sanctioned) or good behaviour (socially sanctioned and adds to prestige or reputation), when information is available about payoffs and prestige. We propose and model a repeated public good game with heterogeneous conditional cooperators where an agent's donation in a public goods game depends on comparing the number of donations in the population in the previous round and with the agent's arbitrary chosen conditional cooperative criterion. Such individuals imitate the social behaviour of role models based on their payoffs and prestige. The dependence is modelled by two population-level parameters: affinity towards payoff and affinity towards prestige. These affinities influence the degree to which agents value the payoff and prestige of role models. Agents update their conditional strategies by considering both parameters. The simulations in this study show that high levels of cooperation are established in a population consisting of heterogeneous conditional cooperators for a certain range of affinity parameters in repeated public good games. The results show that social value (prestige) is important in establishing cooperation.
| S-EPMC7277267 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The problem of public good provision is central in economics and touches upon many challenging societal issues, ranging from climate change mitigation to vaccination schemes. However, results which are supposed to be applied to a societal scale have only been obtained with small groups of people, with a maximum group size of 100 being reported in the literature. This work takes this research to a new level by carrying out and analysing experiments on public good games with up to 1000 simultaneous players. The experiments are carried out via an online protocol involving daily decisions for extended periods. Our results show that within those limits, participants' behaviour and collective outcomes in very large groups are qualitatively like those in smaller ones. On the other hand, large groups imply the difficulty of conveying information on others' choices to the participants. We thus consider different information conditions and show that they have a drastic effect on subjects' contributions. We also classify the individual decisions and find that they can be described by a moderate number of types. Our findings allow to extend the conclusions of smaller experiments to larger settings and are therefore a relevant step forward towards the understanding of human behaviour and the organisation of our society.
| S-EPMC6803689 | biostudies-literature
Project description:For a well-mixed population, we consider a threshold public good game where group members only obtain benefits from a public good if a sufficiently large number of them cooperates. We investigate the effect of an increase in the threshold on the level of cooperation that evolves. It is shown that for sufficiently large participation costs, the level of cooperation is higher for low and for high thresholds, than it is for intermediate thresholds - where in the latter case cooperation may not evolve at all. The counterintuitive effect where an increase in the threshold from an intermediate to a high one decreases the probability of cooperation, is related to the so-called common-enemy hypothesis of the evolution of cooperation. We further apply our analysis to assess the relative weight of different game types across the parameter space, and show that game types where either a small, or a large fraction of the population evolves as cooperators, receive more weight compared to game types where an intermediate fraction of cooperators evolves.
| S-EPMC7125178 | biostudies-literature
Project description:What makes people willing to pay costs to help others, and to punish others' selfishness? Why does the extent of such behaviors vary markedly across cultures? To shed light on these questions, we explore the role of formal institutions in shaping individuals' prosociality and punishment. In Study 1 (N=707), American participants who reported living under higher quality cooperation-enforcing institutions (police and courts) gave significantly more in a Dictator Game (DG), but did not punish significantly more in a Third-Party Punishment Game (TPPG). In Study 1R (N=1705), we replicated the positive relationship between reported institutional quality and DG giving observed in Study 1. In Study 2 (N=516), we experimentally manipulated institutional quality in a repeated Public Goods Game with a centralized punishment institution. Consistent with the correlational results of Study 1 and 1R, we found that centralized punishment led to significantly more prosociality in a subsequent DG compared to a no-punishment control, but had no significant direct effect on subsequent TPPG punishment (only an indirect effect via increased DG giving). Thus we present convergent evidence that the quality of institutions one is exposed to "spills over" to subsequent prosociality but not punishment. These findings support a theory of social heuristics, suggest boundary conditions on spillover effects of cooperation, and demonstrate the power of effective institutions for instilling habits of virtue and creating cultures of cooperation.
| S-EPMC5875418 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Many practitioners as well as researchers explore promoting environmentally conscious behavior in the context of public goods systems. Numerous experimental studies revealed various types of incentives to increase cooperation on public goods. There is ample evidence that monetary and non-monetary incentives, such as donations, have a positive effect on cooperation in public goods games that exceeds fully rational and optimal economic decision making. Despite an accumulation of these studies, in the typical setting of these experiments participants decide on an allocation of resources to a public pool, but they never exert actual effort. However, in reality, we often observe that players' real effort is required in these public goods game situations. Therefore, more analysis is needed to draw conclusions for a wider set of incentive possibilities in situations similar to yet deviating from resource allocation games. Here we construct a real effort public goods game in an online experiment and statistically analyze the effect different types of incentives have on cooperation. In our experiment, we examine combinations of monetary and social incentives in a setting aimed closer to practical realities, such as financial costs and real effort forming part of the decision to cooperate on a public good. In our real effort public goods game participants cooperate and defect on image-scoring tasks. We find that in our setting economic and social incentives produce an asymmetric effect. Interestingly economic incentives decreased the share of highly uncooperative participants, while social incentives raised the share of highly cooperative participants.
| S-EPMC8046186 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Norms can promote human cooperation to provide public goods. Yet, the potential of norms to promote cooperation may be limited to homogeneous groups in which all members benefit equally from the public good. Individual heterogeneity in the benefits of public good provision is commonly conjectured to bring about normative disagreements that harm cooperation. However, the role of these normative disagreements remains unclear because they are rarely directly measured or manipulated. In a laboratory experiment, we first measure participants' views on the appropriate way to contribute to a public good with heterogeneous returns. We then use this information to sort people into groups that either agree or disagree on these views, thereby manipulating group-level disagreement on normative views. Participants subsequently make several incentivized contribution decisions in a public goods game with peer punishment. We find that although there are considerable disagreements about individual contribution levels in heterogeneous groups, these disagreements do not impede cooperation. While cooperation is maintained because low contributors are punished, participants do not use punishment to impose their normative views on others. The contribution levels at which groups cooperate strongly relate to the average normative views of these groups.
| S-EPMC7542426 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectivesInvestigate the acceptability of financial incentives for initiating a medically supervised benzodiazepine discontinuation programme among people with long-term benzodiazepine use and to identify programme features that influence willingness to participate.MethodsWe conducted a discrete choice experiment in which we presented a variety of incentive-based programs to a sample of older adults with long-term benzodiazepine use identified using the outpatient electronic health record of a university-owned health system. We studied four programme variables: incentive amount for initiating the programme, incentive amount for successful benzodiazepine discontinuation, lottery versus certain payment and whether partial payment was given for dose reduction. Respondents reported their willingness to participate in the programmes and additional information was collected on demographics, history of use and anxiety symptoms.ResultsThe overall response rate was 28.4%. Among the 126 respondents, all four programme variables influenced stated preferences. Respondents strongly preferred guaranteed cash-based incentives as opposed to a lottery, and the dollar amount of both the starting and conditional incentives had a substantial impact on choice. Willingness to participate increased with the amount of conditional incentive. Programme participation also varied by gender, duration of use and income.ConclusionsParticipation in an incentive-based benzodiazepine discontinuation programme might be relatively low, but is modifiable by programme variables including incentive amounts. These results will be helpful to inform the design of future trials of benzodiazepine discontinuation programmes. Further research is needed to assess the financial viability and potential cost-effectiveness of such economic incentives.
| S-EPMC5640034 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This dataset belongs to a framed economic field experiment conducted in 2016 in Bhilwara district in Rajasthan state in India. A public good game was framed as dam management challenge. We made incentivized payments based on the game earnings. The data are organized as a panel defined by players and experiment rounds. The dataset contains the experiment decisions in different phases of the experiment as well as socio-economic variables of the anonymized players. The data can be accessed through the Dataverse of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) under the following link: https://doi.org/10.21421/D2/MFT8ZD. The data article is related to the research article Falk et al. [2] on "Experimental games for developing institutional capacity to manage common water infrastructure in India".
| S-EPMC6817663 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundThe origin and stability of cooperation is a hot topic in social and behavioural sciences. A complicated conundrum exists as defectors have an advantage over cooperators, whenever cooperation is costly so consequently, not cooperating pays off. In addition, the discovery that humans and some animal populations, such as lions, are polymorphic, where cooperators and defectors stably live together--while defectors are not being punished--, is even more puzzling. Here we offer a novel explanation based on a Threshold Public Good Game (PGG) that includes the interaction of individual and group level selection, where individuals can contribute to multiple collective actions, in our model group hunting and group defense.ResultsOur results show that there are polymorphic equilibria in Threshold PGGs; that multi-level selection does not select for the most cooperators per group but selects those close to the optimum number of cooperators (in terms of the Threshold PGG). In particular for medium cost values division of labour evolves within the group with regard to the two types of cooperative actions (hunting vs. defense). Moreover we show evidence that spatial population structure promotes cooperation in multiple PGGs. We also demonstrate that these results apply for a wide range of non-linear benefit function types.ConclusionsWe demonstrate that cooperation can be stable in Threshold PGG, even when the proportion of so called free riders is high in the population. A fundamentally new mechanism is proposed how laggards, individuals that have a high tendency to defect during one specific group action can actually contribute to the fitness of the group, by playing part in an optimal resource allocation in Threshold Public Good Games. In general, our results show that acknowledging a multilevel selection process will open up novel explanations for collective actions.
| S-EPMC2989973 | biostudies-literature