Effort, inequality and cooperation: evidence from the lab

Kjetil Bjorvatn () and Nicola Coniglio
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Kjetil Bjorvatn: NHH, Norwegian School of Economics

No 02-2018, SERIES from Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza - Università degli Studi di Bari "Aldo Moro"

Abstract: We investigate the impact of inequality on cooperation using a linear public good game and focusing on heterogeneity in the source of income, where some participants work for their endowment (“workers”) while others do not (“non-workers”). The key finding of our paper is that cooperation is higher when workers are grouped with other workers, and we provide evidence that the underlying mechanism for this result is a higher degree of altruism between workers. Our results thus lend support to the concerns that inequality may have detrimental effects on economic efficiency.

Keywords: public goods; inequality; source of income heterogeneity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F1 O1 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 277
Date: 2018-04, Revised 2018-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-hrm
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