The Demographics of cooperation: Evidence from a field experiment in the Gori-Ganga Basin

Sujoy Chakravarty, Carine Sebi (), E. Somanathan and Emmanuel Theophilus
Additional contact information
Carine Sebi: Agence d'Urbanisme de la R�gion Grenobloise, Grenoble

Discussion Papers from Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi

Abstract: The public goods problem (Hardin, 1968) either viewed as a problem of extraction or that of contribution has had a long history in the Social Sciences. Our experimental design uses a standard Voluntary Contributions Mechanism (VCM) game with a moderately large group of ten and face-to-face communication. The subjects, who are villagers in the Gori-Ganga Basin of the Central Himalayas, are not re-matched every period. Our results are somewhat different from laboratory experiments using a similar design such as Isaac and Walker (1988a, 1988b). A noteworthy general observation is that even with a relatively low Marginal Per Capita Return (MPCR = 0.2) and a large group we find a steady contribution rate around 55 percent which diminishes slightly at the end of the session to around 50 percent. We also delve into the demographic characteristics of our subject pool and find that individual contribution to the common pool is determined by gender, age, caste, literacy and history of cooperation in the experiment. However, face-to-face communication is not seen to increase average individual contribution to the common pool.

Keywords: voluntary contributions mechanism; field experiments; gender; caste; minority (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C93 H41 Q23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2010-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.isid.ac.in/~pu/dispapers/dp10-07.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Demographics of Cooperation: Evidence from a Field Experiment in the Gori-Ganga Basin (2013)
Working Paper: The Demographics of Cooperation: Evidence from a Field Experiment in the Gori-Ganga Basin (2013)
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:alo:isipdp:10-07

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Debasis Mishra ().