Larger groups may alleviate collective action problems

Sung-Ha Hwang

No 1113, Working Papers from Nam Duck-Woo Economic Research Institute, Sogang University (Former Research Institute for Market Economy)

Abstract: This paper shows how larger group size can enhance punishing behavior in social dilemmas and hence support higher levels of cooperation. This occurs when agents can punish fellow group members who violate cooperative norms. Unlike existing approaches that focus on decentralized punishment, I view punishment to be a collective activity and show that pun- ishers can ?divide and conquer?defectors more e¢´ectively as the size of the group increases. To describe the punishment activities more precisely I develop a con?ict model which gener- alizes Lanchester?s equations - equations which describe the time evolution of the strengths of two competing armies.

Keywords: Collective action; group size; collective punishment; Lanchester?s equation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-evo, nep-hpe and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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https://tinyurl.com/yolsu86c First version, 2011 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Larger groups may alleviate collective action problems (2009)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sgo:wpaper:1113

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