Sharing information and threshold ambiguity in public bads prevention

Md Tawhidul Islam, Kenta Tanaka and Koji Kotani
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Md Tawhidul Islam: School of Economics and Management, Kochi University of Technology
Kenta Tanaka: Faculty of Economics, Musashi University, Tokyo, Japan

No SDES-2024-3, Working Papers from Kochi University of Technology, School of Economics and Management

Abstract: Public bads prevention problems, such as climate change, require people to cooperate above a certain threshold which is ambiguous and varies in many situations. In that case, people conjecture and share some information about the threshold. However, little is known about how sharing such information affects people to cooperate. We experimentally examine how people’s cooperative choices are influenced by ambiguity and sharing information about the conjectures in public bads prevention, hypothesizing that sharing the information does not necessarily contribute to cooperation. We conduct the laboratory experiment with 400 subjects under five treatments each of which differs in ambiguity as well as in presence or absence of sharing the information. We find that (i) the percentages of cooperative choices are nonmonotonic, decreasing and then increasing over ambiguity levels and (ii) sharing the information tends to uniformly discourage cooperation, and the negative impact becomes prominent as the ambiguity levels rise. The result demonstrates an adverse effect between sharing information and threshold ambiguity on cooperation, being in sharp contrast with the literature. Overall, this study suggests that how or what information is shared among people should be carefully reconsidered for resolving any public bads problem involving threshold ambiguity, as everybody is able to easily publicize her conjectures during an era of digital democracy.

Keywords: Threshold ambiguity; sharing information; public bads; cooperation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2024-06, Revised 2024-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
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Published in SDE Series, June 2024, pages 1-24

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http://www.souken.kochi-tech.ac.jp/seido/wp/SDES-2024-3.pdf First version, 2024 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Sharing Information and Threshold Ambiguity in Public Bads Prevention (2025)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kch:wpaper:sdes-2024-3

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