Quantitative determination of the level of cooperation in the presence of punishment in three public good experiments

Strong reciprocity is a fundamental human characteristic associated with our extraordinary sociality and cooperation. Laboratory experiments on social dilemma games and many field studies have quantified well-defined levels of cooperation and propensity to punish/reward. The level of cooperation is observed to be strongly dependent on the availability of punishments and/or rewards. Here, we propose an operational approach based on the evolutionary selection of prosocial behaviors to explain the quantitative level of the propensity to punish in three experimental set-ups. A simple cost/benefit analysis at the level of a single agent, who anticipates the action of her fellows, determines an optimal level of altruistic punishment, which explains quantitatively experimental results on a third-party punishment game, the ultimatum game and an altruistic punishment game. We also report numerical simulations of an evolutionary agent-based model of repeated agent interactions with feedback by punishments, which confirms that the propensity to punish is a robust emergent property selected by the evolutionary rules of the model. The cost-benefit reasoning is not to be taken literally but rather to embody the result of the selection pressure of co-evolving agents that have make them converge to their preferences (which can be seen as either hard-wired and/or culturally selected). In this view, the prosocial preference of humans is a collective emergent process, robustly selected by adaptation and selection. Our main contribution is to use evolutionary feedback selection to quantify the value of the prosocial propensity to punish, and test this prediction on three different experimental set-ups.     

Social norms,costly punishment and the evolution of cooperation

Within a co-evolutionary framework of reputations, strategies and social norms, we study the role of punishment in the promotion of cooperation. Norms differ according to whether they allow or do not allow the punishment action to be a part of the strategies, and, in the case of the former, they further differ in terms of whether they encourage or do not encourage the punishment action. In such a framework, depending on the applied social norm, players are first given different reputations based on their employed strategies. Players then update their strategies accordingly after they observe the payoff differences among different strategies. Finally, over a longer horizon, the evolution of the social norms may be driven by the average payoffs of all members of the society. The strategy dynamics are articulated under different social norms. It is found that costly punishment does contribute to the evolution toward cooperation. Not only does the attraction basin of the cooperative evolutionary stable state become larger, but the speed of convergence to the CESS also becomes faster. These two properties are further enhanced if the punishment action is encouraged by the social norm.     

Firms,public good provision and institutional uncertainty: Evidence from Russia

Enterprises in post-socialist and transition economies often participate in providing infrastructure and social services to the surrounding community which in the Russian legal setting should be local authorities’ responsibility. We propose that this bundling of social and infrastructure goods provision with firm's core operations is a fully rational choice in an uncertain institutional environment. A unique survey data suggest that this manifests itself through more reliable infrastructure, stronger employee attachment to the firm and, most interestingly, through better relations with the authorities. Relationship with authorities is a two-way game where the firm gains from the arrangement but on the other faces sanctions if it decided to depart from it. Firm's participation in the arrangement is clearly enhanced by inherited fixed capital assets from the Soviet era.     

Resources, conflict and development choices: public good provision in resource rich economies

Natural resource wealth can be a curse or a blessing for a country. This paper hypothesises that the provision of productive public goods (or lack of it) is a pathway that helps understand these different outcomes when policy choices are made under the threat of conflict inherent in resource-rich countries. Facing potential conflict over resources, a self-interested ruler may choose to invest in either military repression or in productive public goods—physical and social infrastructure. While both measures aim at preventing conflict, we show theoretically that the optimal policy choice depends on the relative effectiveness of the ruler and the population in contesting the resources. Increased resource wealth provides a disincentive to invest in development if the ruler is more effective than the population in appropriating the resources. Conversely, if the ruler is relatively ineffective, more resource wealth induces higher levels of public goods. We present empirical evidence consistent with the predictions of the model for a sample of 57 countries over three decades. Thus, we provide and test empirically a conditional resource curse theory, postulating that the relative effectiveness of the contenders plays a crucial role in determining whether resources are a curse or a blessing.     

印度基础设施及公共服务领域的公私合作

通过分析印度近年来在基础设施或公共服务领域取得的发展,为包括我国在内的众多发展中国家提供了有益的经验和借鉴.     

Equilibrium allocations of endowment-pretension games in public good economies

In a public good economy where agents' preferences are known but endowments are private information, instituting an allocation rule and asking the agents their initial endowments induces an endowment-pretension game. We analyse the Nash equilibrium allocations of this game and discuss its welfare properties with reference to voluntary contributions allocations. Received: 30 May 2001, Accepted: 23 September 2005 JEL Classification: H41 I am grateful to Murat Sertel for his continuous support and encouragement; to G?ksel Asan and Arunava Sen for their invaluable help. I would also like to thank Fikret Adaman, Ahmet Alkan, Salvador Barberá, Semih Koray, Andrei Ratiu, Muhamet Yíldíz, ünal Zenginobuz, an Associate Editor and two referees of the Review of Economic Design for their enlightening comments on previous drafts. Earlier versions of this paper were written during my stay at Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona and at the Indian Statistical Institute. Both visits have been possible by the kindness of the host institutions and the financial support of the Turkish Academy of Sciences and Serem Ltd. It is a pleasure for me to express my gratitude to all these institutions. Of course, all possible errors are mine.     

他们用商业模式做公益

佛说慈悲，佛经和魔法以此为界；佛说布施，不要总想着收获。慈悲是人的本能，而布施往往沦为交易。公益事业不能太过于追求去影响、去改变什么，就像握自己的手掌，太执着了反而抓的越来越少。心安，足矣。     

Unfulfilled Promise: Laboratory experiments in public management research

Abstract

We make the case for increased laboratory experimentation in public management research. Laboratory experiments can generate useful knowledge, particularly in testing causal relationships among constructs of interest. The challenge in this regard is one of identifying the appropriate role for experiments in a greater knowledge production enterprise. Although laboratory experiments are underutilized, they have proffered important knowledge contributions to the field, especially in areas of decision-making and, increasingly, motivation. Because practical problems may pose a greater obstacle to laboratory experimentation in public management than epistemological issues, we address external validity and the cost of conducting laboratory experiments before concluding with suggestions for future research.     

Threshold uncertainty in discrete public good games: an experimental study

A discrete public good is provided when total contributions equal or exceed the contribution threshold. Recent theoretical work shows that an increase in threshold uncertainty will increase (decrease) equilibrium contributions when the public good value is sufficiently high (low). In an experiment designed to test these predictions, I find only limited verification of the prediction. Using elicited beliefs data to represent subjects’ beliefs, I find that behavior is not consistent with expected payoff maximization, however, contributions are increasing in subjects’ subjective pivotalness. Thus, wider threshold uncertainty will sometimes—but not always—hinder collective action.     

Evaluating efficient public good provision: Theory and evidence from a generalised conditional efficiency model for public libraries

Provision of most public goods (e.g., health care, libraries, education, police, fire protection, utilities) can be characterized by a two-stage production process. In the first-stage, basic inputs (e.g., labor and capital) are used to generate service potential (e.g., opening hours, materials), which is then, in the second-stage, transformed into observed outputs (e.g., school outcomes, library circulation, crimes solved). As final outputs are also affected by demand-side factors, conflating both production stages likely leads to biased inferences about public productive (in)efficiency and its determinants. Hence, this paper uses a specially tailored, fully non-parametric efficiency model allowing for both outlying observations and heterogeneity to analyse efficient public good provision in stage one only. We thereby employ a dataset comprising all 290 Flemish public libraries. Our findings suggest that ideological stance of the local government, wealth and density of the local population and source of library funding (i.e., local funding versus intergovernmental transfers) strongly affect library productive efficiency.     

区域经济合作推动公共产品供给的机理及对策

市场经济存在着市场失灵,因此需要政府提供公共产品,同时,由于存在着区域间发展不均衡和地方利益保护,公共产品的供给也存在着严重的不均衡,反过来限制了区域经济一体化的发展和进程。文章研究根据区域经济一体化理论,提出了构建区域经济一体化推动的横向公共产品供给模式,以此更好地推动区域经济合作的思路。     

青岛港口物流公共信息服务平台的架构与建设

港口作为交通运输的枢纽,不再是简单的装卸货物集散地,其功能已发生变化,对我国港口城市、区域经济的发展起到了促进作用。文中旨在分析青岛地区港口物流公共信息平台的功能、架构及建设的迫切性和可行性。通过该文可知青岛港口物流公共信息平台的建成,对于提高青岛市现代物流管理水平,增强港口和相关物流企业的整体竞争实力,具有十分重要的意义,为该信息平台的建设提供决策依据。     

Information complexity, punishment, and stability in two Nash efficient Lindahl mechanisms

Earlier experimental work on public good mechanisms has focused almost exclusively on stability issues, finding that institutions with robust equilibrium stability properties were better at achieving their equilibrium. In this study, we continue to explore this insight and, in addition, look at issues such as out-of-equilibrium punishment and complexity. The experiment varies stability conditions and group size in two Nash efficient Lindahl mechanisms. These mechanisms have similar stability properties. However, when groups are large, they differ both in the severity with which they punish out-of-equilibrium behavior and their informational complexity. We examine how these differences impact mechanism performance.     

Knowledge as a public good: efficient sharing and incentives for development effort

We consider Research-Development joint ventures where adverse selection arises in knowledge sharing, while there is moral hazard involved in the choice of private development efforts aimed at translating privately acquired and/or shared knowledge into valuable marketable innovations. We extend earlier work by Bhattacharya et al. [Bhattacharya, S., Glazer, J., Sappington, D., 1992. Licensing and the Sharing of Knowledge in Research Joint Ventures, J. Econ. Theory, Vol. 56, pp. 43–69.] to situations where one cannot identify a ‘most knowledgeable' partner, by giving conditions under which there exist transfers implementing both efficient first best knowledge sharing and subsequent development efforts.     

Social pressure,uncertainty, and cooperation

We analyse the role of uncertainty in a sequential game where players have to decide whether to contribute to a public project or not. A player's payoff may depend on his belief about the other player's action which allows us to model social pressure. Using the theory of psychological games, we show that the players' propensity to choose an individually costly action such as cooperation in a public project may increase if there is some uncertainty about who has cooperated before. A central agency, e.g. the government, can induce incomplete information by using a randomization policy, thus crowding in private contributions. Received: November 16, 1998 / Accepted: May 31, 1999     

Intelligence promotes cooperation in long-term interaction: experimental evidence in infinitely repeated public goods games

Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination - A growing body of literature in experimental economics examines how cognitive ability affects cooperation in social dilemma settings. We...     

Trading equilibrium in a public good economy with smooth preferences and a mixed measure space of consumers

Lindahl and Nash equilibria are often used in the theory of public good. Shitovitz and Spiegel (1998) present an example of 2-person economy with one private good and one pure public good, where the core efficient Lindahl allocation does not Pareto dominate the (inefficient) Nash allocation. In this paper we introduce the new concept of Trading equilibrium for a general public good economy with smooth preferences and a mixed measure space of consumers. We obtain that this economy admits a unique Trading equilibrium. Moreover, the Trading equilibrium induces a core allocation that strictly Pareto dominates the Nash allocation.     

Local public goods, property values, and local public choice

This paper examines the relationship between the benefits and costs of local public good provision and local property values within the context of the Koopmans-Beckmann-Gale location-assignment model. Property values do not in general measure accurately the marginal net benefits of local public goods; special conditions sufficient for property values to measure or bound the marginal net benefits are stated, however. In addition, it is shown that under certain circumstances, households vote for property-value-enhancing levels of local expenditures. Under these conditions, a political equilibrium produces a Lindahl solution to the local public good problem.