Abstract
In social dilemmas where personal benefits are in conflict with collective benefits, there is an incentive for people to behave non-cooperatively as free-riders. However, everyday observation reveals seemingly unselfish behavior or so-called “other-regarding behavior,” which can be a motivation driving conservation decisions. This study presents evidence on how villagers behave in other-regarding games (the dictator game, trust game, and public good game), and how they behave in their actual collective actions in community conservation activities. Findings of the public good game had significant external validity with actual cooperative activities, suggesting that voluntary cooperation behavior plays a key role in real-life cooperative decision-making. However, none of the results of the answers to attitudinal trust questions provides any predictive value in estimating participation rates in conservation activities.
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Notes
The proxies of real-life behavior in previous studies were applied in different levels. For example, Rustagi et al. (2010) applied the outcome for potential crop trees at the village level as a proxy of forest commons management, whereas the size of fishing nets of individual fishermen was used in the study of Fehr and Leibbrandt (2011) as a proxy of cooperation in real life at the individual level.
Bamboo dikes and mangrove afforestation serve a similar purpose of reducing erosion and stimulating sedimentation. Coastal surveillance is to ensure that fishers follow the community rules (e.g., a ban on all destructive fishing gear) and helping other fishers in case of accidents that happened at sea.
UGTCN, founded in 1992, is a network of community organizations which are all located on the coast of the upper Gulf of Thailand. Its mission is to conserve and rehabilitate marine and coastal resources in the upper Gulf of Thailand.
It should be noted that there was no direct involvement of the coordinator from the UGTCN in the actual running of the experiments. The role of the latter was solely to help announce the experiments to the villagers and gather the names of participants.
At the time, 100 baht was equal to approximately US$ 3.33. As the daily wage was 300 baht (approximately US$ 10), this is a third of the minimum daily wage.
For more details about the cooperative activities, please see “Appendix C”.
Return ratio = amount returned/amount available to return.
Glaeser et al. (2000) found only two attitudinal trust questions (GSS strangers and GSS caution) that predicted trusting behavior in the experiment.
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Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the Economy and Environment Program for Southeast Asia (EEPSEA) for funding. In addition, we would like to thank Herminia Francisco, Jack Knetsch and Therese Lindahl for their suggestions and comments. This paper was largely written while the first author was a Mäler scholar at the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, for which we gratefully acknowledge funding provided by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency.
Funding
This research was supported by Economy and Environment Program for Southeast Asia (EEPSEA). The Grant No. 106612-00000000-027.
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Jarungrattanapong, R., Boonmanunt, S. Collective action and other-regarding behavior: an assessment of games vs reality in Thailand. Environ Econ Policy Stud 22, 485–507 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10018-020-00266-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10018-020-00266-7