Leveraging the Honor Code: Public Goods Contributions under Oath

Jérôme Hergueux,Nicolas Jacquemet,Jason F Shogren,Stéphane Luchini

doi:10.1007/s10640-021-00641-2

Abstract

Public good games are at the core of many environmental challenges. In such social dilemmas, a large share of people endorse the norm of reciprocity. A growing literature complements this finding with the observation that many players exhibit a self-serving bias in reciprocation: “weak reciprocators” increase their contributions as a function of the effort level of the other players, but less than proportionally. In this paper, we build upon a growing literature on truth-telling to argue that weak reciprocity might be best conceived not as a preference, but rather as a symptom of an internal trade-off at the player level between (i) the truthful revelation of their private reciprocal preference, and (ii) the economic incentives they face (which foster free-riding). In truth-telling experiments, many players misrepresent private information when this is to their material benefit, but to a significantly lesser extent than what would be expected based on the profit-maximizing strategy. We apply this behavioral insight to strategic situations, and test whether the preference revelation properties of the classic voluntary contribution game can be improved by offering players the possibility to sign a classic truth-telling oath. Our results suggest that the honesty oath helps increase cooperation (by 33% in our experiment). Subjects under oath contribute in a way which is more consistent with (i) the contribution they expect from the other players and (ii) their normative views about the right contribution level. As a result, the distribution of social types elicited under oath differs from the one observed in the baseline: some free-riders, and many weak reciprocators, now behave as pure reciprocators.

Highlights

Laboratory evidence on the voluntary provision of public goods has identified two main mechanisms that efficiently promote cooperation in situations in which private and public interests do not coincide: (i) Pricing – the “willing punishers” pay to inflict monetary punishment on non-cooperativeWhile such mechanisms have been shown to work well in the lab, their field implementation raises several concerns
We see that the oath increases contributions to the public good by 33 percent
The literature on voluntary contribution in public good games has identified several mechanisms achieving higher levels of cooperation in social dilemma (Chaudhuri, 2011). Such improvement is obtained by implementing real economic commitment at the cost of private losses due to punishment, or welfare losses due by sorting

Summary

Introduction

Laboratory evidence on the voluntary provision of public goods has identified two main mechanisms that efficiently promote cooperation in situations in which private and public interests do not coincide: (i) Pricing – the “willing punishers” pay to inflict monetary punishment on non-cooperative. While such mechanisms have been shown to work well in the lab, their field implementation raises several concerns. While the threat of ostracism is an efficient tool used by collectives to enforce social norms and promote cooperation, such mechanisms are difficult and costly to generalize within legal systems

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