Institutions and Behavior: Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Democracy

Pedro Dal Bó, Andrew Foster and Louis Putterman

No 2007-9, Working Papers from Brown University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We present results from a novel experiment on the effect of a policy designed to encourage cooperation in a prisoner's dilemma game. We find that the effect of this policy on the level of cooperation is greater when it was chosen democratically by the subjects than when it was exogenously imposed. This difference remains after controlling for selection (those that choose the plicy may be more likely to be affected by it). We conclude that the treatment effect of policies may depend on whether they are endogenous or exogenous to the society on which they are imposed. Therefore, democratic institutions may have an effect on behavior in addition to the effect in terms of policy choice. More generally, our findings have implications for empirical studies of treatment effects in other contexts: the effect of a treatment may depend on whether it is endogenous or exogenous.

Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-dev, nep-exp, nep-pol and nep-soc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
https://economics.brown.edu/sites/g/files/dprerj72 ... ers/2007-9_paper.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Institutions and Behavior: Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Democracy (2010)
Working Paper: Institutions and Behavior: Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Democracy (2008)
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:bro:econwp:2007-9

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Brown University, Department of Economics Department of Economics, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Brown Economics Webmaster ().