Collective Action and Intra-Group Conflict: An Experiment

Chizhe Cheng, Cary Deck and Wonjong Kim

Defence and Peace Economics, 2025, vol. 36, issue 2, 167-182

Abstract: In many situations, two rivals find themselves facing a common threat necessitating cooperation. Such alliances are uneasy as the parties anticipate eventually competing against each other in the future. Recent theoretical work shows that both standalone and joint contribution strategies, as well as a hybrid of the two, can emerge in equilibrium where the former strategy is characterized by one of the rivals contributing enough to eliminate the common threat, while the latter is characterized by rivals providing half the necessary effort to eliminate the common threat. Using a controlled laboratory experiment, we show that player behavior is best described by the hybrid strategy. However, none of these predictions closely describes the observed behavior, which is better described as following a proportionate rule.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10242694.2023.2280336 (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:taf:defpea:v:36:y:2025:i:2:p:167-182

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/GDPE20

DOI: 10.1080/10242694.2023.2280336

Access Statistics for this article

Defence and Peace Economics is currently edited by Professor Keith Hartley

More articles in Defence and Peace Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().