Four essays on the impact and evolution of cooperative norms in social dilemmas: An experimental approach

Abstract

We use laboratory experiments to investigate social norms in a variety of situations. First, we look at a finitely repeated linear public goods game. Contributions to public goods start at about 40 to 60 percent of the social optimum and decay over time. We demonstrate that beliefs held by players about the contributions to be made by their peers to the public good play a crucial role in determining their own contributions. We go on to argue that it is the heterogeneity in the initial distribution of beliefs among conditionally cooperative players in the population that is the key explanation behind the familiar pattern of decay. After this, we explore two separate mechanisms for sustaining cooperation in the public goods game over time: (1) recommended play asking participants to cooperate and (2) punishments for free-riders. We find that contributions in the initial rounds are higher in the treatment with recommendation compared to the baseline and punishment treatments. However contributions decay much faster with recommendation whereas contributions increase in treatments with punishment over time. Likewise, payoffs are the highest with a recommendation in the initial rounds but decrease over time whereas payoffs increase in the punishment treatment over time. Next we investigate the efficacy of recommended play and performance bonuses in resolving coordination failures in a stag-hunt type coordination game with multiple Pareto-ranked equilibria, often referred to as a "weak link" game. We look at performance in both fixed and randomly re-matched groups. A recommendation to the payoff-dominant outcome is successful in resolving coordination failures with fixed groups. Resolving coordination failures is harder with randomly re-matched groups and the greatest success is achieved only upon payment of a performance bonus. In the final part of this dissertation we investigate the role of framing, history, inequity and culture in shaping attitudes towards corruption by extending the game introduced by Cameron, et al. (2009) into a repeated game setting. We find more punishment and less bribery than in the one-shot game. We also find that the use of loaded language reduces the incidence of bribery, and that this game does capture attitudes towards corruption above and beyond sentiments of negative retribution. Subjects from Auckland (New Zealand) offered bribes more frequently and punished corrupt behaviour less often than students from Kolkata (India) and Bangkok (Thailand) which is surprising given that New Zealand is considered far less corrupt than India or Thailand. We go on to discuss the implications for external validity of such corruption experiments.