Reciprocity and exclusion in informal financial institutions: An experimental study of rotating savings and credit associations

Shimpei Koike, Mayuko Nakamaru, Tokinao Otaka, Hajime Shimao, Ken-Ichi Shimomura and Takehiko Yamato

PLOS ONE, 2018, vol. 13, issue 8, 1-23

Abstract: Group cooperation is fundamental to human society. The public goods game is often used to describe the difficulty of group cooperation. However, there are other structures of institutions to maintain group cooperation such as Rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs). ROSCAs are informal financial institutions that exist worldwide, in which all participants contribute to a common fund and take turns to receive a return. ROSCAs are common in developing countries and among migrant groups in developed countries. There are various types of ROSCAs, and they share a crucial problem in that participants whose turn to receive a return has passed have an incentive to default on their contributions. We conducted a laboratory experiment to investigate the mechanisms that can prevent default in a fixed ROSCA, in which the order of receipt of returns is determined before starting and is also known to members. The findings are as follows. (i) Excluding low contributors from ROSCA groups by voting increased contribution rates both before and after the receipt of returns. (ii) ROSCA members exhibited reciprocity and a sense of revenge: that is, members contributed to the returns payments of other members who had contributed to them, and did not contribute to the returns payments of non-contributors. Voluntary behaviors thus sustained ROSCAs. Meanwhile, an exogenous punishment whereby subjects were prevented from receiving returns payments unless they had themselves contributed previously did not increase contribution rates.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0202878 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 02878&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Reciprocity and Exclusion in Informal Financial Institutions: An Experimental Study of Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (2015)
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:plo:pone00:0202878

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0202878

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().