On the value of participation: endogenous emergence of social norms in a three-player ultimatum game experiment

We report results from two different settings of a three-player ultimatum game. Under the “Monocratic” rule, a player is randomly selected to make an offer to two receivers. Under the “Democratic” rule, all three players make a proposal, and one proposal is then randomly selected. A majority vote is required to implement the proposal in either setting. Although the two rules are strategically equivalent, different patterns of behaviour emerge as the number of interactions increase. Under the “Monocratic” rule, proposers seem to be entitled to claim a larger share of the pie, and receivers are more likely to accept, than in the “Democratic” rule. We speculate that institutions allowing more participation in the process of collective choice lead to a more socially responsible behaviour in individuals.     

Public sector pay and corruption: Measuring bribery from micro data

This study provides the first systematic measure of bribery using micro-level data on reported earnings, household spending and asset holdings. We use the compensating differential framework and the estimated sectoral gap in reported earnings and expenditures to identify the size of unobserved (unofficial) compensation (i.e., bribes) of public sector employees. In the case of Ukraine, we find that public sector employees receive 24–32% less wages than their private sector counterparts. The gap is particularly large at the top of the wage distribution. At the same time, workers in both sectors have essentially identical level of consumer expenditures and asset holdings that unambiguously indicate the presence of non-reported compensation in the public sector. Using the conditions of labor market equilibrium, we develop an aggregate measure of bribery and find that the lower bound estimate of the extent of bribery in Ukraine is between 460 million and 580 million U.S. dollars (0.9–1.2% of Ukraine's GDP in 2003).     

Contractual preferences and moral biases: social identity and procedural fairness in the exclusion game experiment

Many people may suffer from moral biases when making allocation decisions having consequences to others. This means that some factors hinder people from finding, or constructing, their true social preferences in those situations. As a counterforce to this, numerous devices of moral priming have evolved—such as parenting, formal education as well as various formal and informal contracting procedures. This paper focuses on the influences of social identity and the perceived fairness of contracting procedures on subjects’ behaviour in situations of allocation decisions. The analysis of experimental data suggest, first, that males are less likely than females to engage in other-regarding behaviour in a pre-agreement situation where two active players divide an endowment among themselves and a third, passive, player. However, this difference disappeared after the joint contract of the rule of dividing the endowment was made. Second, it was found that students of economics are less likely than other students to behave in an other-regarding way before the contract; this difference remained also in decisions after the contract was made. Finally, both a random selection mechanism and a majority voting mechanism were rated fair by the majority of the subjects. However, the data suggests that fairness ratings are positively associated with compliant behavior only in the case of the majority voting mechanism.     

Letting third parties who suffer from petty corruption talk: Evidence from a collusive bribery experiment

Following a recommendation by Transparency International, we conduct a laboratory experiment to gauge the impact of a specific type of grassroots participation on petty corruption. Participants play a one-shot, three-person sequential bribery game that, depending on the treatment, either gives or does not give passive third parties suffering from corruption the opportunity to send a publicly visible message to potential bribers and bribees. We find that messaging opportunities deter bribe offers (i.e., the extensive margin of bribe), but affect neither the size of the offered bribe (i.e., the intensive margin) nor bribe acceptances. We conjecture that the different impact of the treatment on bribe-givers and bribe-takers may be due to the order of play.     

On social norms and beliefs: A model of manager environmental behavior

A prevailing view in the literature states that social sanctions can support, in equilibrium, high levels of obedience to a costly norm. The reason is that social disapproval and stigmatization faced by the disobedient are highest when disobedience is the exception rather than the rule in society. In contrast, the Bayesian model introduced here shows that, imperfect information causes the expected social sanction to be lowest precisely when obedience is more common. This, amongst other findings, draws a distinct line between social and moral norms, both of which may depend on others’ behavior but not on action observability. The implications of the use of non-Bayesian belief formation rules by society, namely a representativeness rule (overweighting the signals) and conservativism (overweighting the prior), for payoff functions and equilibria are explored.     

Social norms of sharing in high school: Teen giving in the dictator game

We conduct a study of altruistic behavior among high school students using the dictator game. We find a much stronger norm of equal splitting than previously observed in the typical university student population, with almost 45% of high school subjects choosing an equal split of the endowment. Tests indicate that this difference is not due to factors traditionally considered in the analysis of these games, such as demographics. Rather, we find that dictators who score higher on a Social Generosity measure are much more likely to conform to the 50/50 norm. Additionally, high school students who score in the high range of an Independence measure send significantly less to recipients.     

Inefficiency and social exclusion in a coalition formation game: experimental evidence

This paper experimentally investigates the impact of reciprocal behavior in multilateral bargaining and coalition formation. Our results show that reciprocal fairness strongly affects the efficiency and equity of coalition formation. In a large majority of cases, inefficient and unfair coalitions are chosen when their coalition values are relatively high. Up to one third of the experimental population is excluded from bargaining and earns nothing. In monetary terms economically significant efficiency losses occur. We find that the interplay of selfish and reciprocal behavior unavoidably leads to this undesirable consequences. We also compare the predictions of recently developed models of social preferences with our experimental results. We find that some of these models capture the empirical regularities surprisingly well.     

On the persistence of corruption

This paper tries to answer the question why the phenomenon of corruption seems to be inherently existent in any society. The dynamic model presented shows how rational agents may generate multiple equilibria of corruption within the same kind of socio-economic system. We assume that the individual disutility caused by the loss of reputation from a corrupt transaction depends on the acceptance of corrupt behavior by the representative individual. Depending on the values of some key parameters like the marginal utility of corrupt behavior and the initial acceptance of corruption a completely corrupt equilibrium where all people completely accept corruption or a completely honest equilibrium where corruption is not accepted at all may be the limit state of the optimal path. Also inner equilibria in-between exist; however, they are always unstable.     

Evolutionary stability of social norms in a socioeconomic equilibrium model

A hybrid of a model of economic equilibrium in two markets and a social game is formed. The link between the two is established through a social norm that conditions correct social behavior on economic variables and therefore distorts the economic equilibrium allocation. The initial endowment of an individual determines whether she gains from a social norm. The evolution of norms is examined in a dynamic model where norms are more likely to persist if they deliver higher utility to their believers. Also it is assumed that norms lose importance when they are disobeyed by their believers. Optimally coordinating norms are not necessarily evolutionarily stable, and a suboptimal norm can be the outcome of the evolutionary process.     

Communication and coordination in the laboratory collective resistance game

This paper presents a laboratory collective resistance (CR) game to study how different forms of non-binding communication among responders can help coordinate their collective resistance against a leader who transgresses against them. Contrary to the predictions of analysis based on purely self-regarding preferences, we find that non-binding communication about intended resistance increases the incidence of no transgression even in the one-shot laboratory CR game. In particular, we find that the incidence of no transgression increases from 7 percent with no communication up to 25–37 percent depending on whether communication occurs before or after the leader’s transgression decision. Responders’ messages are different when the leaders can observe them, and the leaders use the observed messages to target specific responders for transgression.

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Electronic Supplementary Material The online version of this article () contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.      

论制度滞后与矿业腐败的契合

矿业领域的某些暴富与执行矿业制度导致的腐败有密切联系。通过实证分析发现我国矿业制度中,矿产物权的获取和矿业市场的准入这两项基本制度存在明显缺陷,只要依法实施就会"依法腐败"。源头反腐是对上游的实体制度进行合理变革,可通过国有矿产物权民事主体独立,严格矿业市场准入,实行矿业民主等几个方面重构我国矿业制度。     

Collectively accepted social norms and performativity: the pursuit of normativity of globalization in economic institutions

ABSTRACT

Although the philosophical literature on social institutions has been insightful for social scientific studies, the application of its core concepts, such as collective intentionality, to real institutional dynamics remains challenging. One factor contributing to this situation is insufficient work that identifies collectively accepted social norms and shows how they constitute social institutions. Relying on the perspectives of John Searle and Raimo Tuomela, this study integrates recent analyses of the concept of performativity with discourse analysis. It presents an analytic framework, drawing on the concept of nominalization, to identify collectively accepted social norms that performatively constitute social institutions. Finally, it illustrates the identification of collectively accepted ‘globalization’ that performatively constitutes and shapes economic institutions engaged in corporate financial reporting. This study contributes to closing the gap between philosophical analyses of social institutions and social scientific studies by highlighting the performance of nominalized collectively accepted social norms.     

Moral self-licencing and social dilemmas: an experimental analysis from a taking game in Madagascar

This article explores whether previous good deeds may license antisocial behaviour, such as appropriating a social surplus for private benefits, in a developing country context, namely Madagascar. We design a two-step framed experiment, with one control treatment (a neutral task) and three test treatments (tasks enabling subjects to earn moral credits in three different ways), followed by a taking game in which subjects are given the opportunity to take an amount from a fund allocated to their University. On average, we find that participants in the three licencing conditions appropriate more than those in the control group and that further differences emerge according to the way the moral credits have been earned.     

On corruption,bribes and the exchange of favors

This paper investigates how the availability of alternative forms of bribe payments, on top of money, may facilitate corruption. There are two bribe payment technologies and a Corruptor and a Receiver must agree on the value and on the technology of the bribe. The paper infers which form of payment can be used by analyzing probabilities of punishment, bargaining powers of agents, and relative efficiency of the two different technologies. By assumption, monetary payments have distinct efficiency than do non-monetary favors. If the Receiver has a sufficiently high utility for payments using a particular technology, then only bribes paid via this technology are feasible. There is also a range of intermediate cases where monetary bribery is used if and only if the relative bargaining power of the Receiver is sufficiently large compared to that of the Corruptor.     

Separating reputation, social influence, and identification effects in a dictator game

This study explores the ways in which information about other individual's action affects one's own behavior in a dictator game. The experimental design discriminates behaviorally between three possible effects of recipient's within-game reputation on the dictator's decision: Reputation causing indirect reciprocity, social influence, and identification. The separation of motives is an important step in trying to understand how impulses towards selfish or generous behavior arise. The statistical analysis of experimental data reveals that the reputation effects have a stronger impact on dictators’ actions than the social influence and identification.     

"潜规则"演进的博弈论解释

潜规则是利益主体经过长期博弈形成的稳定的内部制度,在很大程度上是基于非常现实的利害计算。演化博弈分析表明,潜规则的扩散与初始条件有非常敏感的关系,同时,它一旦产生就有强烈的自加强趋势。要缩小或消灭潜规则,必须改进显规则,引进新的机制,改变潜规则的生态环境。