Trust and communication in a property rights dilemma

T.K. Ahn, Loukas Balafoutas, Mongoljin Batsaikhan (), Francisco Campos-Ortiz, Louis Putterman and Matthias Sutter

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2018, vol. 149, issue C, 413-433

Abstract: We study in five diverse countries a laboratory social dilemma game in which incentives to steal from others lead to the socially inefficient diversion of resources from production unless the members of a given mini-society can abide by norms of non-theft or engage in low cost collective protection of their members’ wealth accumulations. We compare two treatments in which subjects have opportunities to exchange free-form messages to one without such opportunities, finding that most subjects allocate far less to theft and most groups achieve much greater efficiency in the presence of communication. Ease of identifying who has engaged in theft varies across the two communication treatments, but is of minor importance to the outcome. We find several coding-amenable elements of message content to be statistically significant predictors of group and individual outcomes. Contributing to the literature on culture, norms, and preferences, we find that the degree to which communication fosters cooperation varies among countries in a manner correlated with variation in survey based trust and with desistance from theft at the outset of our communication-free experiment treatment.

Keywords: Property rights; Theft; Efficiency; Experiment; Communication (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 C92 D03 H41 P14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726811830009X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Trust and Communication in a Property Rights Dilemma (2016)
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:jeborg:v:149:y:2018:i:c:p:413-433

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2018.01.009

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().