Leader Punishment and Cooperation in Groups: Experimental Field Evidence from Commons Management in Ethiopia

By Michael Kosfeld, Devesh Rustagi. 2015

150 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We conduct a social dilemma experiment in which real-world leaders can punish group members as a third party. Despite facing an identical environment, leaders are found to take remarkably different punishment approaches. The different leader types revealed experimentally explain the relative success of groups in managing their forest commons. Leaders who emphasize equality and efficiency see positive forest outcomes. Antisocial leaders, who punish indiscriminately, see relatively negative forest outcomes. Our results highlight the importance of leaders in collective action, and more generally the idiosyncratic but powerful roles that leaders may play, leading to substantial variation in group cooperation outcomes. (JEL C93, D03, O13, Q23)

Subfields: Demography, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1bcc1e91d4127d41fd49145c88a648bb9d1d8672

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

1. Andrés Santos
2. A. Shaikh
3. Ivan A. Canay

In Safety Research

1. Andrés Santos
2. A. Shaikh
3. Ivan A. Canay

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Andrés Santos
2. A. Shaikh
3. Ivan A. Canay

Citations in the corpus

• The Wild Bootstrap with a “Small” Number of “Large” Clusters (2019, methodology): “Recent examples of its use as either the leading inferential method or as a robustness check for conclusions drawn under other procedures include Acemoglu et al. (2011), Giu-liano and Spilimbergo (2014), Kosfeld and Rustagi (2015), and Meng, Qian, and Yared (2015).”