Kinship and friendship in a trust game with third party punishment

This paper reports on a set of trust games with third party punishment (TPP) where participants are either family members or friends or unrelated villagers. The experimental sessions were carried out in southern Namibia (Karas) and the bordering northern South Africa (Namaqualand). The aim was to test several hypotheses derived from kin selection theory as well as to assess the importance of third party punishment for encounters among family members and friends. Building on Hamilton, (1964) it was proposed by e.g. Madsen et al., (2007) that kinship is the baseline behaviour among humans. Thus, I use kinship as basis for comparison of how we treat friends and unrelated people and when there is the possibility to punish free-riding behaviour. It turns out that kinship is the baseline behaviour when no other features are available to humans. However, a personal exchange among friends that has a third party observer performs better than a personal exchange among family members without third party punishment. Contributions to family members can substantially be increased by third party punishment. Thus, human ability to sustain a norm by punishing freeriders at personal costs could also have played an important role in sustaining co-operation among kin.Trust, field experiment, third party punishment, kinship, friendship

Individual Heterogeneity, Group Interaction, and Co-operative Behaviour: Evidence from a Common-Pool Resource Experiment in South Africa and Namibia

We present econometric evidence on the influence of an individual’s sociodemographic characteristics, economic background, and dynamic personal and group interactions on co-operative behaviour in a social dilemma situation. The data are from a framed common-pool resource experiment conducted in Namibian and South African farming communities. Our paper helps to better understand the discrepancy between the fact that people seem to care about advancing their relative position in real life but tend to act to reduce inequality in a laboratory setting. We analyse the first move in the game, the cumulated amount of resources gained by the players and, by taking into account the temporal dimension of the game in a panel context, each individual move.Common-pool resources, field experiment, group interaction, relative income position, Southern Africa

Saving, Microinsurance: Why You Should Do Both or Nothing. A Behavioral Experiment on the Philippines

This paper analyzes data from a novel field experiment designed to test the impact of two different insurance products and a secret saving device on solidarity in risk-sharing groups among rural villagers in the Philippines. Risk is simulated by a lottery, risk-sharing is possible in solidarity groups of three and insurance is introduced via less risky lotteries. Our main hypothesis is that formal market-based products lead to lower transfers among network members. We also test for the persistence of this crowding-out of solidarity. We find evidence for a reduction of solidarity by insurance if shocks are observable. Depending on insurance design, there is also evidence for persistence of this effect even if insurance is removed. Simulations using our regression results show that the benefits of insurance are completely offset by the reduction in transfers. However, if secret saving is possible solidarity is very low in general and there is no crowding out effect of insurance. This suggests that introducing formal insurance is not as effective as it is hoped for when the monetary situation can be closely monitored, but that it might be a very important complement when savings inhibit observing financial resources. --

The shadow of the future and the shadow of the past: Studying the impact of climate change on human behaviour

There is consent among researchers that climate change results in increasing number of extreme weather events, migration and even the need to resettle entire populations. Understanding the behaviour of climate refugees and people exposed to extreme events are key in order to avoid emergency mass movements or even conflict over natural and social resources. I propose a research project with two related parts that identify the human reaction to the impacts of climate change by combining a comparative research design and the use of economic experiments, survey methods and modelling techniques. The first part of the project builds upon a unique sample of experimentally measured risk and solidarity preferences of 800 Filipinos taken in 2012 in. In order to assess the impact of the damages induced by typhoon 'Haiyan' and the following recovery aid we will carry out two follow-up studies with the same people in order to obtain panel data on solidarity and risk preferences for robust statistical inference.The second part of the project will focus on the effects of anticipated forced and permanent relocation. The major innovation offered by the proposed set-up is a sample of inhabitants from atoll and island communities where the communities only differ in the timing of the expected relocation due to sea level rise with additional use of priming techniques. The set-up allows studying how preferences and behavior of people change with the prospect of being severely affected by climate change and whether and how these affect short and medium-term adaptation strategies such as an increased extraction of natural resources and migration

Victim sensitivity in groups

Victim sensitivity (VS)—a personality trait reflecting the anxious expectation of being exploited—reliably predicts egoistic behavior in interpersonal situations. Here, we look at intragroup situations and investigate whether even one highly victim-sensitive individual can have a detrimental effect of solidarity and cooperativeness on the entire group. Two studies—one field study with community residents from Philippine villages who played a solidarity game (N urn:x-wiley:24750387:media:jts576:jts576-math-0001 800 individuals, 30 villages) and one lab study with participants in a small-group setting (N = 144 individuals, 48 groups) who played a public goods game—show that the highest VS score in a group negatively predicts solidarity and cooperation in the group, especially when external stressors (e.g., a natural disaster and a climate of distrust) are present and group-level resilience factors (e.g., in-group identification and task enjoyment) are absent. These results are relevant for research on the intragroup processes both from a basic as well as from an applied perspective

Payments for ecosystem services did not crowd out pro-environmental behavior: Long-term experimental evidence from Uganda

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are increasingly being implemented worldwide as conservation instruments that provide conditional economic incentives to landowners for a prespecified duration. However, in the psychological and economic literature, critics have raised concerns that PES can undermine the recipient’s intrinsic motivation to engage in pro-environmental behavior. Such “crowding out” may reduce the effectiveness of PES and may even worsen conservation outcomes once programs are terminated. In this study, we harnessed a randomized controlled trial that provided PES to land users in Western Uganda and evaluated whether these incentives had a persistent effect on pro-environmental behavior and its underlying behavioral drivers 6 y after the last payments were made. We elicited pro-environmental behavior with an incentivized, experimental measure that consisted of a choice for respondents between more and less environmentally friendly tree seedlings. In addition to this main outcome, survey-based measures for underlying behavioral drivers captured self-efficacy beliefs, intrinsic motivation, and perceived forest benefits. Overall, we found no indications that PES led to the crowding out of pro-environmental behavior. That is, respondents from the treatment villages were as likely as respondents from the control villages to choose environmentally friendly tree seedlings. We also found no systematic differences between these two groups in their underlying behavioral drivers, and nor did we find evidence for crowding effects when focusing on self-reported tree planting behavior as an alternative outcome measure