How formal institutions (e.g. laws and public policies) affect human behaviour represents a crucial issue in economic analysis. Formal rules are defined as obligations backed by incentives. The economic literature has largely studied the role of material incentives in shaping individual behaviour. Yet, the role of obligations, i.e. what formal rules ask people to do or not to do, remains a black box. In this paper we run a public good game to analyze the behavioural effects of obligations. We find experimental evidence that obligations can affect cooperative behaviour both by coordinating conditional co-operators’ beliefs on others’ behaviour and by directly affecting social preferences. Our results shed a new light on the behavioural channels through which formal rules can affect individual behaviour and suggest the opportunity to broaden the scope of analysis in order to better understand the effects of institutions on economic outcomes.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by D.E.S. (Department of Economic Studies), University of Naples "Parthenope", Italy in its series Discussion Papers with number
18_2006.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior C92 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Group Behavior H26 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Tax Evasion H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods K40 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - General
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: