Public Goods Provision and Sanctioning in Privileged Groups

By Ernesto Reuben, Arno Riedl. Social Science Research Network, 2007

166 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In public-good provision, privileged groups enjoy the advantage that some of their members find it optimal to supply a positive amount of the public good. However, the inherent asymmetric nature of these groups may make the enforcement of cooperative behavior through informal sanctioning harder to accomplish. In this article, the authors experimentally investigate public-good provision in normal and privileged groups with and without decentralized punishment. The authors find that compared to normal groups, privileged groups are relatively ineffective in using costly sanctions to increase everyone's contributions. Punishment is less targeted toward strong free riders, and they exhibit a weaker increase in contributions after being punished. Thus, the authors show that privileged groups are not as privileged as they initially seem.

Subfields: Demography, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d02ba0d305361c102c7b72e05b31b3b38906c301

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Citations in the corpus

The limits of self-governance when cooperators get punished: Experimental evidence from urban and rural Russia (2011, background): “While overall punishment behavior is not affected by socio-demographic variables, we find that highly educated people and people who are a member of at least one voluntary civic organization are more likely to punish cooperators.”
Enforcement of contribution norms in public good games with heterogeneous populations (2009, unknown): “Lastly, Reuben and Riedl (2009) and Nikiforakis et al. (2012) investigate groups with heterogeneous beneﬁts from the public good.”
Social influences on risk attitudes: Applications in economics (2012, background): “The asymmetric wealth of the actors involved (with some of the poorer actors also being the largest emitters of greenhouse gases; see Reuben and Riedl (2009) for the effects of such asymmetries on public good contributions), the fact that some of the largest emitters are unlikely to face the highest”
Voting on Punishment Systems Within a Heterogeneous Group (2011, background): “Reuben and Riedl (2009a) study a setting in which one player has an MPCR of 1.5, and thus a dominant strategy to contribute, and the others have an MPCR of 0.5.”