Self-regulatory resources and institutional formation: An experiment

Kenju Kamei

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2024, vol. 222, issue C, 354-374

Abstract: A novel laboratory experiment is used to show that the state of people’s self-regulatory resources influences their reliance on the formal enforcement of norms in a social dilemma. The subjects’ self-regulatory resources are manipulated using well-known depletion tasks. On the one hand, when their resources are not depleted, most decide to govern themselves through decentralized, peer-to-peer punishment in a public goods dilemma, and then achieve high cooperation norms. On the other hand, when the resources are limited, the majority enact a costly formal sanctioning institution; backed by formal punishment, the groups achieve strong cooperation. A supplementary survey on the Covid-19 pandemic was conducted to enhance the external validity of the findings, generating a similar pattern while revealing that people’s desire to commit, not their beliefs about others’ behavior without formal enforcement, drives their institutional preferences. Self-control preference theories, combined with inequity aversion, can explain these patterns because they predict that those with limited self-control are motivated to remove temptations in advance as a commitment device.

Keywords: Institutional choices; Social dilemma; Public goods; Self-Control; Punishment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D02 D72 D91 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:222:y:2024:i:c:p:354-374

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2024.04.016

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