Abstract
Following Fehr and Gäechter (Am Econ Rev 90(4):980–994, 2000), a large and growing number of experiments show that public goods can be provided at high levels when mutual monitoring and costly punishment are allowed. Nearly all experiments, however, study monitoring and punishment in a complete network where all subjects can monitor and punish each other. The architecture of social networks becomes important when subjects can only monitor and punish the other subjects to whom they are connected by the network. We study several incomplete networks and find that they give rise to their own distinctive patterns of behavior. Nevertheless, a number of simple, yet fundamental, properties in graph theory allow us to interpret the variation in the patterns of behavior that arise in the laboratory and to explain the impact of network architecture on the efficiency and dynamics of the experimental outcomes.
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Some of the results reported here were previously distributed in a paper titled “Network Architecture and Mutual Monitoring in Public Goods Experiments.” This research was supported by the Center for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS) at New York University and the UC Berkeley Experimental Social Science Laboratory (Xlab). We are grateful to Jim Andreoni, Boğaçhan Çelen, Andreas Fuster, Tom Palfrey, Matthew Rabin, and Bertil Tungodden for helpful discussions. The paper has benefited from suggestions by the participants of seminars at several universities. Kariv and Carpenter are grateful for the hospitality of the School of Social Science in the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton and Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), respectively. Lastly, while we all share the credit that this research may be due, one of us does not share any blame because he had no idea that the paper had been submitted to this festschrift, commemorating his 65th birthday.
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Carpenter, J., Kariv, S. & Schotter, A. Network architecture, cooperation and punishment in public good experiments. Rev Econ Design 16, 93–118 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10058-012-0120-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10058-012-0120-z