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Public Goods Provision and Sanctioning in Privileged Groups

¹ Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
² CESifo, IZA, and Department of Economics, Maastricht University

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: ereuben{at}northwestern.edu.

	Abstract

In public-good provision, privileged groups enjoy the advantage that some of their members find it optimal to supply a positive amount of the public good. However, the inherent asymmetric nature of these groups may make the enforcement of cooperative behavior through informal sanctioning harder to accomplish. In this article, the authors experimentally investigate public-good provision in normal and privileged groups with and without decentralized punishment. The authors find that compared to normal groups, privileged groups are relatively ineffective in using costly sanctions to increase everyone’s contributions. Punishment is less targeted toward strong free riders, and they exhibit a weaker increase in contributions after being punished. Thus, the authors show that privileged groups are not as privileged as they initially seem.

First published on August 1, 2008, doi:10.1177/0022002708322361

Journal of Conflict Resolution 2009;53:72.

A more recent version of this article appeared on February 1, 2009


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