Kenju Kamei

Public Goods and Voting on Formal Sanction Schemes: An Experiment

The burgeoning literature on the use of sanctions to support public goods provision has largely neglected the use of formal or centralized sanctions. We let subjects playing a linear public goods game vote on the parameters of a formal sanction scheme capable both of resolving and of exacerbating the free-rider problem, depending on parameter settings. Most groups quickly learned to choose parameters inducing efficient outcomes. But despite uniform money payoffs implying common interest in those parameters, voting patterns suggest significant influence of cooperative orientation, political attitudes, and of gender and intelligence.

State or Nature? Formal vs. Informal Sanctioning in the Voluntary Provision of Public Goods

The sanctioning of norm-violating behavior by an effective formal authority is an efficient solution for social dilemmas. It is in the self-interest of voters and is often favorably contrasted with letting citizens take punishment into their own hands. Allowing informal sanctions, by contrast, not only comes with a danger that punishments will be misapplied, but also should have no efficiency benefit under standard assumptions of self-interested agents. We experimentally investigate the relative effectiveness of formal vs. informal sanctions in the voluntary provision of public goods. Unsurprisingly, we find that effective formal sanctions are popular and efficient when they are free to impose. Surprisingly, we find that informal sanctions are often more popular and more efficient when effective formal sanctions entail a modest cost. The reason is that informal sanctions achieve more efficient outcomes than theory predicts, especially when the mechanism is chosen by voting.

Play it again : partner choice, reputation building and learning from finitely repeated dilemma games.

Often the fuller the reputational record peoples actions generate, the greater their incentive to earn a reputation for cooperation. However, inability to “wipe clean” ones past record might trap some agents who initially underappreciate reputations value in a cycle of bad behaviour, whereas a clean slate could have been followed by their “reforming” themselves. In a laboratory experiment, we investigate what subjects learn from playing a finitely repeated dilemma game with endogenous, symmetric partner choice. We find that with a high cooperation premium and good information, investment in cooperative reputation grows following exogenous restarts, although earlier end-game behaviours are observed.

Play it Again: Partner Choice, Reputation Building and Learning in Restarting, Finitely-Repeated Dilemma Games

Previous research has shown that opportunities for two-sided partner choice in finitely repeated social dilemma games can promote cooperation through a combination of sorting and opportunistic signaling, with late period defections by selfish players causing an end-game decline. How such experience would affect play of subsequent finitely-repeated games remains unclear. In each of six treatments that vary the cooperation premium and the informational basis for reputation formation, we let sets of subjects play sequences of finitely-repeated voluntary contribution games to study the competing forces of (a) learning about the benefits of reputation, and (b) learning about backward unraveling. We find, inter alia, that with a high cooperation premium and good information, investment in reputation grows across sets of finitely-repeated games.

Promoting Competition or Helping the Less Endowed? Distributional Preferences and Collective Institutional Choices under Intragroup Inequality

Unequally distributed resources are ubiquitous. The decision of whether to promote competition or equality is often debated in societies and organizations. With heterogeneous endowments, we let subjects collectively choose between a public good that most benefits the less endowed and a lottery contest in which only one individual in a group receives a prize. Unlike standard theoretical predictions, the majority of subjects, including a substantial number of subjects who believe that their expected payoffs are better in the contest, vote for the public good. Our data suggest that people’s collective institutional choices may be driven by inequality-averse concerns. It also suggests that the collective decision to select the option for the public good depends on voting rules.

Reputation Transmission Without Benefit to the Reporter: A Behavioral Underpinning of Markets in Experimental Focus

Reputation is a commonly cited check on opportunism in economic and social interactions. But it is often unclear what would motivate an agent to report another’s behavior when the pool of potential partners is large and it is easy enough for an aggrieved player to move on. We argue that behavioral or social preference motivations may solve this conundrum. In a laboratory experiment in which subjects lack any private material incentive to report partners’ actions, we find that most cooperators incur a cost to report a defecting partner when this has the potential to deprive the latter of future gains and to help his next partner.

Expressing Emotion and Fairness Crowding-Out in an Ultimatum Game with Incomplete Information

Recent experimental research has shown that when rating systems are available, buyers are more generous in accepting unfair offers made by sellers. It has also shown that sellers make fairer decisions when they are rated, while some studies show that they are little affected by the rating systems. These studies are conducted under complete information settings. However, asymmetric information about the values of traded commodities between sellers and buyers may change their perception of fairness and thus may change sellers’ decisions. We conduct ultimatum game experiments in which only the sellers are informed of the size of pies. We find that when rating systems are available to the buyers, the buyers become more amenable to potentially unfair offers. We also find that sellers attempt to sell the commodity at higher prices, taking advantage of the buyers’ openness to potentially unfair offers, contrary to the past studies with complete information.

REPUTATION TRANSMISSION WITHOUT BENEFIT TO THE REPORTER: A BEHAVIORAL UNDERPINNING OF MARKETS IN EXPERIMENTAL FOCUS: REPUTATION TRANSMISSION IN EXPERIMENTAL FOCUS

Reputation is a commonly cited check on opportunism in economic and social interactions. But it is often unclear what would motivate an agent to report another’s behavior when the pool of potential partners is large and it is easy enough for an aggrieved player to move on. We argue that behavioral or social preference motivations may solve this conundrum. In a laboratory experiment in which subjects lack any private material incentive to report partners’ actions, we find that most cooperators incur a cost to report a defecting partner when this has the potential to deprive the latter of future gains and to help his next partner.

Collective Selection of Representatives and the Democracy Effect

It is known that being involved in democratic decision-making of a policy affects people’s level of cooperation in dilemma situations, even if selection bias is controlled for. Past experimental work used direct democracy as the form of the decision-making process. But is there such a democracy effect when people democratically select representatives that take some action on behalf of them in the future? We let subjects play a real-effort task in a group and then one representative distributed group total payoffs among their members. The representatives were selected either by subjects’ votes or by the computer randomly in each group. Our data indicates that there is no (or at most negative) impact of representative democracy on subjects’ behavior. This may mean that the democracy effect seen in the past experiments is driven by direct democracy.

Altruistic Norm Enforcement and Decision-Making Format in a Dilemma: Experimental Evidence

Past research has shown that people often take punitive actions towards norm violators even when they are not directly involved in transactions. However, it at the same time suggests that such third-party punishment may not be strong enough to enforce cooperation norms in dilemma situations. This paper experimentally compares the effectiveness of third-party punishment between different enforcement formats. Consistent with past studies, our data shows that having an individual third-party punisher in a group does not make one’s defection materially unbeneficial because of the weak punishment intensity. It also shows that third-party punishment is not effective when two individuals form a pair as a punisher and jointly decide how strong third-party punishment they impose. However, third-party punishment can be sufficiently strong to enforce cooperation norms when a third-party punisher’s action choice is made known to another individual third-party punisher in a different group, or when there are two independent individual third-party players in a group.