Pro-social risk-taking and intergroup conflict: A volunteer's dilemma experiment

Abstract

Pro-social risk-taking involves the willingness to commit resources to initiatives and opportunities with a social benefit, as well as a risk of costly failure. These situations often occur in an environment in which groups compete for resources. In these contexts of intergroup conflict, often individuals make personal sacrifices on a voluntary basis, involving considerable risks of failure. We study the context of pro-social risk-taking and intergroup conflict by extending the volunteer's dilemma along both of these dimensions. We introduce a novel group competition treatment to identify the effect of intergroup competition without providing with an additional collective prize like the majority of past laboratory experiments. We find evidence that intergroup competition significantly increases the rate of providing a public good, and mitigates the negative impact of risk on intragroup cooperation. Regarding individual heterogeneity, we explore and discuss the impact of risk aversion and gender, and its implication for parochial altruism.