Why feed the Leviathan?

Pablo Guillen, Christiane Schwieren and Gianandrea Staffiero

Public Choice, 2007, vol. 130, issue 1, 115-128

Abstract: This is a study about the possibility of self-governance. We designed two versions of a step-level public good game, with or without a centralized sanctioning mechanism (CSM). In a baseline treatment participants play 14 rounds of the non-CSM game. In an automatic removal (AR) treatment participants play 7 rounds with CSM plus 7 rounds without CSM. In voted removal (VR) participants play 7 rounds with CSM followed by a voting stage to decide whether to keep CSM. All VR groups removed CSM. Contributions in AR and VR after CSM removal are dramatically higher than in the baseline. Most groups with a CSM history managed to cooperate until the last round. We do not find more cooperation in VR than in AR. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007

Keywords: Public good; Step-level; Sanctioning institution; Cooperation; Education; Trust (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11127-006-9075-3 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:pubcho:v:130:y:2007:i:1:p:115-128

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11127-006-9075-3

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla (sonal.shukla@springer.com) and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (indexing@springernature.com).