Abstract
Do institutions shape the possibility of sustaining cooperation when the same individuals must first divide resources and then attempt to cooperate? It could be that simply having received an inequitable division undermines cooperative behavior, reducing aggregate welfare. Alternatively, it might be that only when interacting with the same individual or group does this spillover occur, in which case separating tasks across institutions may prevent this negative spillover. To test these arguments, we designed a two-stage incentivized experiment in which participants interact in a division task and then in a task in which cooperation improves aggregate welfare. In two experiments, individuals were randomly assigned to interact either with the same individual for both tasks or with a different individual for each task. In the second experiment, individuals could also interact with a person who was in the same arbitrary group as their partner in the division task. Holding constant both past history and past partner behavior, the results of these experiments provide support for a Partner History effect in which the mechanism that produces spillover is interacting with the same individual in both decisions. We also find evidence for a weaker Group History effect in which negative spillover occurs when the partner in the cooperative task is a member of the same group as the partner from the division task.
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Data Availability and replication materials
Data and code necessary to reproduce the analysis presented in the manuscript is available at the Harvard Dataverse https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/H7BWDJ.
Notes
Although our focus here is sequential interaction, past research on spillover has also addressed simultaneous interaction in two different strategic contexts (e.g. Bednar, et al., 2012).
This could also be due a different kind of reciprocity, upstream (generalized) reciprocity (Nowak & Roch, 2007). Our design cannot disentangle these different motivations, but instead holds constant past outcomes to allow us to isolate the relative importance of that outcome originating with the same vs. different partners.
Those who were recruited to be the Decider were matched to multiple participants who were Receivers. Because the behavior of the Deciders in the Policy Game is not of theoretical interest, this decision allowed us to implement the experiment for substantially reduced costs.
Participants were assigned to groups with the following equation: (number of clicks mod 4). By doing so, there is a correlation of 0 between the number of times participants clicked and their group assignment.
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We thank the Center for the Study of American Politics and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale for financial support. Additionally, we thank Chris Dawes and participants in the American Politics Workshop at Yale University for helpful comments and advice.
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Bokemper, S.E., Huber, G.A. On the Merits of Separate Spaces: Why Institutions Isolate Cooperation and Division Tasks. Polit Behav (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-023-09874-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-023-09874-x