Self-regulatory resources and institutional formation: An experiment

Abstract

A novel laboratory experiment is used to show that the state of people’s self-regulatory resources influences their reliance on the formal enforcement of norms in a social dilemma. The subjects’ self-regulatory resources are manipulated using well-known depletion tasks. On the one hand, when their resources are not depleted, most decide to govern themselves through decentralized, peer-to-peer punishment in a public goods dilemma, and then achieve high cooperation norms. On the other hand, when the resources are limited, the majority enact a costly formal sanctioning institution; backed by formal punishment, the groups achieve strong cooperation. A supplementary survey on the Covid-19 pandemic was conducted to enhance the external validity of the findings, generating a similar pattern while revealing that people’s desire to commit, not their beliefs about others’ behavior without formal enforcement, drives their institutional preferences. Self-control preference theories, combined with inequity aversion, can explain these patterns because they predict that those with limited self-control are motivated to remove temptations in advance as a commitment device.