Denial and Alarmism in Collective Action Problems

Manuel Foerster and Joel (J.J.) van der Weele ()
Additional contact information
Joel (J.J.) van der Weele: Universiteit van Amsterdam

No 18-019/I, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

Abstract: We analyze communication about the social returns to investment in a public good. We model two agents who have private information about these returns as well as their own taste for cooperation, or social preferences. Before deciding to contribute or not, each agent submits an unverifiable report about the returns to the other agent. We show that even if the public good benefits both agents, there are incentives to misrepresent information. First, others’ willingness to cooperate generates an incentive for “alarmism”, the exaggeration of social returns in order to opportunistically induce more investment. Second, if people also want to be perceived as cooperators, a “justification motive” arises for low contributors. As a result, equilibrium communication features “denial” about the returns, depressing contributions. We illustrate the model in the context of institutional inertia and the climate change debate.

Keywords: cheap talk; cooperation; image concerns; information aggregation; public goods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D64 D82 D83 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-03-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-gth, nep-mic and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.tinbergen.nl/18019.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:tin:wpaper:20180019

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 ().