Inter-group Cooperation with Unequal Revenues: Micro-evidences from Laboratory Experiments
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| Title | Inter-group Cooperation with Unequal Revenues: Micro-evidences from Laboratory Experiments
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| Author | Huang Zhanbing |
| Organization | International Business school Shaanxi Normal University |
| Email | hzb10@163.com |
| Key Words | Inter-group Cooperation; Unequal Group Income; Mental Account; Nested Social Dilemma; Experiment; Conditional Cooperation |
| Abstract | When the benefits that can be obtained from the future intergroup cooperation are not equal, will this inequality affect the inter-group cooperation? It is proposed that inter-group cooperation is related to private account, inner-group account and inter-group account according to mental account theory from behavioral economics. Individual decision-makers are in a nested social dilemmas environment with multiple public goods. Inter-group cooperation with unequal incomes can be viewed as a problem that how individuals in different groups contribute to the global public goods. With the help of nested social dilemmas public goods model and laboratory experiments, three hypotheses are proposed and tested. It is concluded that platform exists or not, relative income differences and conditional cooperation affect the individuals’ contribution to the global public goods. Two particular phenomena are found: (1) When group incomes are unequal, the contribution comes from low-income group members is higher than the groups with same level of incomes but group incomes are equal. (2) The highest contribution emerged in an environment where average level of group income is high and the income difference among the group incomes is moderate. The result shows that the difference among group incomes is intertwined with conditional cooperation. These two factors affect inter-group cooperation jointly. |
| Serial Number | WP565 |
| Time | 2014-01-14 |
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