【主讲】Jaimie Lien (香港中文大学)
【主题】Endogenous Rewards Promote Cooperation
【时间】2017年6月9日 (周五) 15：30-17：00
【地点】上海财经大学经济学院楼701室
【语言】英文
【摘要】Sustaining cooperation in social dilemmas has long been a fundamental challenge in the social and biological sciences. In the public-goods game (PGG), providing a punishment option to community members has been shown to effectively promote cooperation (Fehr, Gächter, 2000, 2002; Fehr, Fischbacher, 2003; Gürerk et al., 2006), reversing the typical decay phenomenon prevalent in the standard PGG (Ledyard, 1995). However, punishment mechanisms have some serious disadvantages, involving destruction of a society’s physical resources as well as its overall social capital. A more efficient approach may be to instead employ a reward mechanism. We propose an endogenous reward mechanism that taxes the gross income of each round’s PGG play (at 20%), and assigns it to a fund; each player then decides how to distribute his or her share of the fund as rewards to other members of the community. Our mechanism is the first to successfully achieve a high level of contribution (about 70%) with budget-balanced (1:1) rewards that require no external funding, an important condition for realistic implementation; in addition, this mechanism functions under anonymity. Rewards lead to a significant increase of cooperation, and more importantly, the trend of cooperation is increasing with rewards. In addition, we find that regardless of their own contributions, players are much more likely to reward higher contributors than lower ones. We develop a theoretical model to show that under the assumption of conditional cooperation, improvement in cooperation is more likely to emerge with our rewards setup rather than without it. Our data are consistent with the higher contribution levels under endogenous reward being driven by two main components: First, a rational response to reward formation can help to avoid the no-contribution outcome. Second, conditional cooperation plays a crucial role in maintaining high levels of public-goods contributions.
