Sustaining cooperation through self-sorting The good, the bad, and the conditional

In four public-good game experiments, we study self-sorting as a means to facilitate cooperation in groups. When individuals can choose to join groups precommitted to charity, such groups sustain cooperation toward the group’s local public good. By eliciting subjects’ conditional contribution profil...

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Published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 116; no. 12; pp. 5299 - 5304
Main Authors Hauge, Karen Evelyn, Brekke, Kjell Arne, Nyborg, Karine, Lind, Jo Thori
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States National Academy of Sciences 19.03.2019
Subjects
COLLOQUIUM PAPERS
Cooperation
Sackler on Economics, Environment, and Sustainable Development
Social Sciences
conditional cooperation
corporate social responsibility
voluntary contributions
altruism
public goods
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Summary:In four public-good game experiments, we study self-sorting as a means to facilitate cooperation in groups. When individuals can choose to join groups precommitted to charity, such groups sustain cooperation toward the group’s local public good. By eliciting subjects’ conditional contribution profiles, we find that subjects who prefer the charity groups have higher average conditional contribution levels but do not differ with respect to the slope of their profiles. The majority of subjects in both group types are conditional cooperators whose willingness to contribute is stimulated by generous group members but undermined by free-riders. Charity groups thus seem better able to sustain cooperation because they attract a greater number of more generous individuals, triggering generous responses by conditional cooperators.
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Edited by Simon A. Levin, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved June 28, 2018 (received for review March 1, 2018)
Author contributions: K.E.H., K.A.B., K.N., and J.T.L. designed research, performed research, analyzed data, and wrote the paper.
1K.E.H., K.A.B., K.N., and J.T.L. contributed equally to this article.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1802875115