Intrinsic motivation in economics: A history

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Incitations, motivations prosociales et politiques publiques pro-environnementales : une réflexion illustrée par la politique de gestion des déchets en France

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The stickiness of norms

International audienceIn this paper we study the role of social context, as characterized by different informal norm-enforcement mechanisms, on the deterrence legacy of temporary external regulations. In a public goods game, we create conditions in which a prosocial norm of cooperation is enforced via either anonymous peer punishment or face-saving concerns. In two test treatments, we introduce to these social environments an external regulation that is implemented for a limited period of time and then removed. We observe a significant negative post-intervention effect of this removal in the context of peer disapproval, but no such effect in the context of face-saving concerns. Our findings reveal the importance of the type of norm-enforcement mechanism in determining the robustness of norm adherence in the long term

Accident costs, resource allocation and individual rationality: Blum, Kalven and Calabresi

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Group Formation and Cooperation in social dilemmas: a survey and meta-analytic evidence

International audienceIn the last two decades, many laboratory experiments have tested the hypothesis that groups that are composed of "like-minded" subjects maintain higher cooperation levels than randomly formed groups. We survey the growing literature on group formation in the context of three types of social dilemma games: public goods games, common pool resources, and the prisoner's dilemma. The 62 selected papers study the effect of different sorting mechanisms-endogenous, endogenous with the option to play the game, and exogenous-on cooperation rates. For each sorting mechanism, we highlight the main design features and findings. Our survey shows that with the endogenous sorting, cooperation is fragile since cooperators are constantly chased by free-riders. Additional institutional arrangements are needed to ensure that cooperative behaviors can survive over time. As for the exogenous sorting mechanism, the dimension on which people are sorted affects the homogeneity of the group and therefore the level of cooperation. The surveyed literature does not directly compare the effect of the two sorting mechanisms. To do so, we conduct a meta-analysis using a panel of 241 group-level observations from 9 papers. We find that the endogenous sorting backed with various institutional arrangements prevents the decay in cooperation over time, which is not the case for the exogenous sorting

Group Formation and Cooperation in Social Dilemmas: a Survey and Meta-Analytic Evidence

We survey the growing literature on group formation in the context of three types of social dilemma games: public goods games, common pool resources, and the prisoner’s dilemma. The 62 surveyed papers study the effect of different sorting mechanisms – endogenous, endogenous with the option to play the game, and exogenous – on cooperation rates. Our survey shows that cooperators are highly sensitive to the presence of free-riders, independently of the sorting mechanism. We complement the survey with a meta-analysis showing no difference in terms of cooperation between studies implementing an endogenous and exogenous sorting. What is more, we find that it is no more likely for a cooperator to be matched with like-minded partners in endogenously formed groups than in exogenously formed groups. These observations are related. As we show in the survey, the success of a sorting method in matching like-minded individuals and the levels of cooperation are closely interlinked

La peine : le prix du crime ?

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The perils of democracy

International audienceIn this work we examine a common social dilemma in experimental economics, the public goods game, to determine how voting impacts pro-social behavior. As noted in Markussen et al. (2014), a democratic dividend exists. Couching the public goods game in a phenomenon that is playing out in much of the world – drastic income inequality – we examine the decision of groups to share local public goods with groups that have, effectively, no endowment to contribute toward public nor private consumption. Our results show the perils of democracy in that subjects in the position to vote use their advantageous situation to reward the ingroups at the expense of the less endowed outgroup members