Choice of the Group Increases Intra-Cooperation

This research investigates how variation in sociality, or the degree to which one feels belonging to a group, affects the propensity for participation in collective action. By bringing together rich models of social behavior from social psychology with decision modeling techniques from economics, these mechanisms can ultimately foster cooperation in human societies. While variation in the level of sociality surely exists across groups, little is known about whether and how it changes behavior in the context of various economic games. Specifically, we found some socialization task makes minimal group members behavior resemble that of an established group. Consistent with social identity theory, we discovered that inducing this type of minimal sociality among participants who were previously unfamiliar with each other increased social identity, and sustained cooperation rates in the newly formed groups to the point that they were comparable to those in the already established groups. Our results demonstrate that there are relatively simple ways for individuals in a group to agree about appropriate social behavior, delineate new shared norms and identities

Communication, cooperation and collusion in team tournaments - An experimental study

We study the effects of communication in an experimental tournament between teams. When teams, rather than individuals, compete for a prize there is a need for intra-team coordination in order to win the inter-team competition. Introducing communication in such situations may have ambiguous effects on effort choices. Communication within teams may promote higher efforts by mitigating the internal free-rider problem. Communication between competing teams may lead to collusion, thereby reducing efforts. In our experiment we control the channels of communication by letting subjects communicate through an electronic chat. We find, indeed, that communication within teams increases efforts and communication between teams reduces efforts. We use team members’ dialogues to explain these effects of communication, and check the robustness of our results

The Evolution of Sharing Rules in Rent Seeking Contests: Incentives Crowd Out Cooperation

Modern societies are characterized by competing organizations that rely predominantly on incentive schemes to align the behavior of their members with the organizations’ objectives. This study contributes to explaining why in so many cases incentive schemes have gradually crowded out cooperation as an organization device. Our explanation does not draw on free-riding, the obvious Achilles’ heel of cooperation, but relies completely on fundamental group contest mechanisms. By investigating a canonical rent seeking model and adopting an evolutionary perspective, the analysis identifies shortcomings in previous results, sets the record straight, and explains why the process of incentivizing organizations is protracted.group contests, rent-seeking, sharing rules, cooperation

Formation of coalition structures as a non-cooperative game

Traditionally social sciences are interested in structuring people in multiple groups based on their individual preferences. This pa- per suggests an approach to this problem in the framework of a non- cooperative game theory. Definition of a suggested finite game includes a family of nested simultaneous non-cooperative finite games with intra- and inter-coalition externalities. In this family, games differ by the size of maximum coalition, partitions and by coalition structure formation rules. A result of every game consists of partition of players into coalitions and a payoff? profiles for every player. Every game in the family has an equilibrium in mixed strategies with possibly more than one coalition. The results of the game differ from those conventionally discussed in cooperative game theory, e.g. the Shapley value, strong Nash, coalition-proof equilibrium, core, kernel, nucleolus. We discuss the following applications of the new game: cooperation as an allocation in one coalition, Bayesian games, stochastic games and construction of a non-cooperative criterion of coalition structure stability for studying focal points.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1612.02344, arXiv:1612.0374

Communication, cooperation and collusion in team tournaments - An experimental study

We study the effects of communication in an experimental tournament between teams. When teams, rather than individuals, compete for a prize there is a need for intra-team coordination in order to win the inter-team competition. Introducing communication in such situations may have ambiguous effects on effort choices. Communication within teams may promote higher efforts by mitigating the internal free-rider problem. Communication between competing teams may lead to collusion, thereby reducing efforts. In our experiment we control the channels of communication by letting subjects communicate through an electronic chat. We find, indeed, that communication within teams increases efforts and communication between teams reduces efforts. We use team members’ dialogues to explain these effects of communication, and check the robustness of our results.Tournament; Team decision making; Communication; Collusion; Free-riding; ExperimentKommunikation; Kollusion; Trittbrettfahrerverhalten; Experiment

Politicizing Council decision-making: The effect of EP empowerment

Research on the intra-institutional consequences of differences in the EU’s inter-institutional rule configurations is rare. This study investigates the effect of the empowerment of the European Parliament (EP) on the active involvement of ministers in Council decision-making. I argue that the empowerment of the EP increases the incentives for bureaucrats in the Council’s preparatory bodies to refer decisions on legislative dossiers to ministers. The empirical analysis examines this argument with data on more than 6000 legislative decision-making processes that were concluded between 1980 and the end of 2007. The analysis demonstrates a strong and robust association between the type of legislative procedure and different decision-making levels in the Council: a more powerful EP leads to more politicized Council decision-making. In terms of the legitimacy of EU decision-making, this finding implies that empowering the EP does not only create a direct link between EU lawmaker and ordinary citizens, but also contributes to strengthening the indirect link between Council members and their national electorates

Forms and Determinants of R&D Collaborations: New Evidence on French Data

The aim of this paper is to explore the heterogeneity in R&D collaborations and of their determinants and motives. Using a recent French survey on research and innovation relations, we first show the heterogeneity of such relations thanks to a typology of their characteristics: their nature (common research, sub-contracting, multi-partnership, management of a common structure), organizational arrangement (contract, specific investments), duration and type of research (market-oriented vs. research-oriented). Five categories of collaborations are obtained from different combinations of these relational characteristics. Using a multinomial logit estimation (and testing for the IIA assumption), we then try to explain how this diversity of partnerships is related to a broad set of explanatory variables (economic rationale for the cooperation, knowledge spillovers, appropriability conditions and partners’ individual characteristics). Thanks to this original approach, we have obtained new results on R&D cooperation motives.R&D collaboration; heterogeneity; spillovers; organizational arrangements