Exit, Punishment and Rewards in Commons Dilemmas: An Experimental Study

Giangiacomo Bravo and Flaminio Squazzoni

PLOS ONE, 2013, vol. 8, issue 8, 1-9

Abstract: Commons dilemmas are interaction situations where a common good is provided or exploited by a group of individuals so that optimal collective outcomes clash with private interests. Although in these situations, social norms and institutions exist that might help individuals to cooperate, little is known about the interaction effects between positive and negative incentives and exit options by individuals. We performed a modified public good game experiment to examine the effect of exit, rewards and punishment, as well as the interplay between exit and rewards and punishment. We found that punishment had a stronger effect than rewards on cooperation if considered by itself, whereas rewards had a stronger effect when combined with voluntary participation. This can be explained in terms of the ‘framing effect’, i.e., as the combination of exit and rewards might induce people to attach higher expected payoffs to cooperative strategies and expect better behaviour from others.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0069871 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 69871&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pone00:0069871

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0069871

Access Statistics for this article

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