Public Goods Provision and Sanctioning in Privileged Groups

Ernesto Reuben and Arno Riedl

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2009, vol. 53, issue 1, 72-93

Abstract: In public-good provision, privileged groups enjoy the advantage that some of their members find it optimal to supply a positive amount of the public good. However, the inherent asymmetric nature of these groups may make the enforcement of cooperative behavior through informal sanctioning harder to accomplish. In this article, the authors experimentally investigate public-good provision in normal and privileged groups with and without decentralized punishment. The authors find that compared to normal groups, privileged groups are relatively ineffective in using costly sanctions to increase everyone's contributions. Punishment is less targeted toward strong free riders, and they exhibit a weaker increase in contributions after being punished. Thus, the authors show that privileged groups are not as privileged as they initially seem.

Keywords: privileged groups; public goods; punishment; cooperation; collective action (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (70)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022002708322361 (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Public Goods Provision and Sanctioning in Privileged Groups (2007)
Working Paper: Public Goods Provision and Sanctioning in Privileged Groups (2007)
Working Paper: Public goods provision and sanctioning in privileged groups (2007)
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:sae:jocore:v:53:y:2009:i:1:p:72-93

DOI: 10.1177/0022002708322361

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Conflict Resolution from Peace Science Society (International)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().