Group (Re-)formation in Public Good Games: The Tale of the Bad Apple

Christian Grund, Christine Harbring () and Kirsten Thommes ()
Additional contact information
Christine Harbring: RWTH Aachen University
Kirsten Thommes: University of Paderborn

No 9982, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We analyze how different previous roles as partners or strangers in public good games affect an individual's subsequent cooperation in a partner setting. We systematically vary a group's composition from all individuals being partner over blended groups of partners and strangers to all individuals being stranger in each round. Our results show that previous group composition does not affect cooperation in the subsequent partner setting with one exception: Groups cooperate significantly less compared to all other settings, when one stranger entered the group. We further analyze this situation in-depth and find that individuals may labor under an ultimate attribution error: They feel that the newcomer is a "bad apple". The cooperativeness towards the newcomer, but also among oldtimers is disturbed in this case. We conduct additional treatments to back up this result and to show how certain information can prevent such an error.

Keywords: cooperation; economic experiments; group composition; public good game; teams (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C9 M5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2016-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-gth, nep-hpe, nep-net and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: Journal of Ecconomic Behavior & Organization 145 (2018), 306-319.

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Journal Article: Group (Re-) formation in public good games: The tale of the bad apple? (2018)
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