Secret Santa: Anonymity, Signaling, and Conditional Cooperation

David Hugh-Jones and David Reinstein (daaronr@gmail.com)

No 2009-048, Jena Economics Research Papers from Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena

Abstract: Costly signaling of commitment to a group has been proposed as an explanation for participation in religion and ritual. But if the signal's cost is too small, freeriders will send the signal and behave selflshly later. Effective signaling may then be prohibitively costly. If the average level of signaling in a group is observable, but individual effort is not, then freeriders can behave selflshly without being detected, and group members will learn about the average level of commitment among the group. We develop a formal model, and give examples of institutions that enable anonymous signaling, including ritual, religion, music and dance, voting, charitable donations, and military institutions. We explore the value of anonymity in the laboratory with a repeated two-stage public goods game with exclusion. When first-stage contributions are anonymous, subjects are better at predicting second-stage behavior, and maintain a substantially higher level of cooperation.

Keywords: signaling; anonymity; public goods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-07-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-mic, nep-pbe and nep-soc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://oweb.b67.uni-jena.de/Papers/jerp2009/wp_2009_048.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2009-048

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Jena Economics Research Papers from Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Markus Pasche (markus.pasche@uni-jena.de).