Maintaining Cooperation through Vertical Communication of Trust when Removing Sanctions

Ann-Christin Posten (), Pınar Uğurlar (), Sebastian Kube and Joris Lammers ()
Additional contact information
Ann-Christin Posten: University of Limerick
Pınar Uğurlar: Özyeğin University, Istanbul
Joris Lammers: University of Cologne

No 323, ECONtribute Discussion Papers Series from University of Bonn and University of Cologne, Germany

Abstract: An effective way to foster cooperation is to monitor behaviour and sanction freeriding. Yet, previous studies have shown that cooperation quickly declines when sanctioning mechanisms are removed. We test if explicitly expressing trust in players’ capability to maintain cooperation after the removal of sanctions, i.e. vertical communication of trust, has the potential to alleviate this drop in compliance. Four incentivized public-goods experiments (N = 2423) find that the vertical communication of trust maintains cooperation upon the removal of centralized (Study 1), third-party (Study 2), and peer punishment (Study 3), and this effect extends beyond single interactions (Study 4). In all studies, vertical trust communication increases mutual trust among players, providing support to the idea that vertically communicating trust can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Extrapolating our findings to natural environments, they suggest that authorities should carefully consider how they communicate the lifting of rules and sanctions.

Keywords: Cooperation; Vertical Trust; Punishment; Public Good; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D91 H4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2024-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp and nep-gth
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econtribute.de/RePEc/ajk/ajkdps/ECONtribute_323_2024.pdf First version, 2024 (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:ajk:ajkdps:323

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ECONtribute Discussion Papers Series from University of Bonn and University of Cologne, Germany Niebuhrstrasse 5, 53113 Bonn, Germany.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ECONtribute Office ().