Self-Regulatory Resources and Institutional Formation: A First Experimental Test

Kenju Kamei

No 2022-014, Keio-IES Discussion Paper Series from Institute for Economics Studies, Keio University

Abstract: This study reports the result of a novel laboratory experiment that shows for the first time that the state of people�fs self-regulatory resources influences reliance on formal enforcement of norms in a social dilemma. In a laboratory, subjects�f self-regulatory resources are rigorously manipulated using well-known depletion tasks. On the one hand, when their resources are not depleted, the vast majority decide to govern themselves through monitoring and decentralized peer-to-peer punishment in a public goods dilemma, and then successfully achieve high cooperation norms. On the other hand, when their resources are small, the majority vote to enact a costly formal sanctioning institution and then construct deterrent punishment toward free riders; backed by formal punishment, the groups achieve strong cooperation. A supplementary survey regarding the Covid-19 pandemic was also conducted to enhance the external validity of the finding, generating a similar pattern. The so-called self-control and commitment preferences combined with inequality aversion can explain these patterns, because the theory predicts that those with smaller self-regulatory resources are motivated to remove temptations in advance as a commitment device, thereby avoiding a large self-control cost. This underscores the role of commitment in a social dilemma context.

Keywords: Institutional choices; social dilemma; public goods; self-control; punishment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D72 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2022-09-26
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm and nep-exp
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https://ies.keio.ac.jp/upload/DP2022-014_EN.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Self-regulatory Resources and Institutional Formation: A first experimental test (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:keo:dpaper:2022-014

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