Erika Seki

Do Social Preferences Increase Productivity? Field Experimental Evidence from Fishermen in Toyama Bay

We provide a reason for the wider economics profession to take social preferences, a concern for the outcomes achieved by other reference agents, seriously. Although, we show that student measures of social preference elicited in an experiment have little external validity when compared to measures obtained from a field experiment with a population of participants who face a social dilemma in their daily lives (i.e. team production), we do find strong links between the social preferences of our field participants and their productivity at work. We also find that the stock of social preferences evolves endogeously with respect to how widely team production is utilized.

Competitive Work Environments and Social Preferences: Field Experimental Evidence from a Japanese Fishing Community

Abstract Models of job tournaments and competitive workplaces more generally predict that while individual effort may increase as competition intensifies between workers, the incentive for workers to cooperate with each other diminishes. We report on a field experiment conducted with workers from a fishing community in Toyama Bay, Japan. Our participants are employed in three different aspects of fishing. The first group are fishermen, the second group are fish wholesalers (or traders), and the third group are staff at the local fishing coop. Although our participants have much in common (e.g., their common relationship to the local fishery and the fact that they all live in the same community), we argue that they are exposed to different amounts of competition on-the-job and that these differences explain differences in cooperation in our experiment. Specifically, fishermen and traders, who interact in more competitive environments are significantly less cooperative than the coop staff who face little competition on the job. Further, after accounting for the possibility of personality-based selection, perceptions of competition faced on-the-job and the treatment effect of job incentives explain these differences in cooperation to a large extent.

Cooperation, status seeking and competitive behaviour: theory and evidence

We study whether a linear income sharing rule (pooling system) can achieve Pareto efficiency in a problem of joint exploitation of fishery resources. When agents are selfish, the homogeneity of individual outputs in equilibrium is a necessary condition for the efficient pooling system. When agents exhibit a preference for status (i.e. for being among the well-performing members of the group), the pooling system can be efficient even without this condition. This is because, on the one hand, relative status considerations enlarge the tolerable range of heterogeneity and, on the other hand, it generates an incentive structure that may homogenise individual output performances.

Contesting land, creating community, in the Highlands and Islands, Scotland

Abstract This paper draws on research in four communities in the Highlands and Islands, Scotland, to explore how the notion of community and community identity are re‐worked in the political spaces created as communities claim collective rights to land. In the cases of the Assynt Crofters’ Trust, the Bhaltos Community Trust, and Laid, this has concerned land under crofting tenure; in the case of the claim of the North Sutherland Community Forestry Trust, the land on which the Naver Forests stand is the responsibility of the Scottish Ministers and is managed by Forest Enterprise. The four case studies differ with respect to membership and institutional practices and thus provide fertile ground on which to examine, comparatively, collective struggles for the land and the search for sustainable futures.