Public good provision in blended groups of partners and strangers

Christian Grund, Christine Harbring and Kirsten Thommes

Economics Letters, 2015, vol. 134, issue C, 41-44

Abstract: We experimentally analyze cooperation in blended groups, where some group members stay together (partners) and others are switching groups (strangers). Our results reveal that teams consisting partly of members with strangers display a lower productivity compared to teams of permanent group members only. First, strangers cooperate less than partners in blended groups. Second, individual effort decisions increase with the number of group mates who are of the same type. This second effect holds for both strangers and partners and is neither driven by beliefs nor conditional willingness to cooperate. We argue that social identity plays a role here depending on group composition and the individuals’ role in a group.

Keywords: Cooperation; Economic experiment; Group; Public good (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C9 M5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176515002487
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ecolet:v:134:y:2015:i:c:p:41-44

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2015.06.008

Access Statistics for this article

Economics Letters is currently edited by Economics Letters Editorial Office

More articles in Economics Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().