Free-Riding and Performance in Collaborative and Non-Collaborative Groups

Tibor Besedes, Cary Deck (), Sarah Quintanar (), Sudipta Sarangi and Mikhael Shor

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Individuals bring effort to a group to achieve a common objective. Group membership introduces a free riding incentive, reducing effort, as well as a social responsibility incentive, increasing effort. This paper shows that the free riding effect is stronger. Individuals significantly reduce their effort as the difficulty of the task increases when they cannot collaborate in the group. Once collaboration is allowed, the negative effects of free riding are not observed. Collaborating groups outperform both groups without collaboration and individuals. They do as well as the best constituent member would have done on her own, thus aggregating existing knowledge.

Keywords: group behavior; decision making; free-riding; experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D71 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-08-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-soc
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https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/33948/1/MPRA_paper_33948.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/55791/1/MPRA_paper_55791.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Free-Riding and Performance in Collaborative and Non-Collaborative Groups (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:33948

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