IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/sgo/wpaper/1113.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Larger groups may alleviate collective action problems

Author

Listed:
  • Sung-Ha Hwang

    (Department of Economics, Sogang University, Seoul)

Abstract

This paper shows how larger group size can enhance punishing behavior in social dilemmas and hence support higher levels of cooperation. This occurs when agents can punish fellow group members who violate cooperative norms. Unlike existing approaches that focus on decentralized punishment, I view punishment to be a collective activity and show that pun- ishers can ?divide and conquer?defectors more e¢´ectively as the size of the group increases. To describe the punishment activities more precisely I develop a con?ict model which gener- alizes Lanchester?s equations - equations which describe the time evolution of the strengths of two competing armies.

Suggested Citation

  • Sung-Ha Hwang, 2011. "Larger groups may alleviate collective action problems," Working Papers 1113, Nam Duck-Woo Economic Research Institute, Sogang University (Former Research Institute for Market Economy).
    • Handle: RePEc:sgo:wpaper:1113
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://tinyurl.com/yolsu86c
    File Function: First version, 2011
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Karthik Panchanathan & Robert Boyd, 2004. "Indirect reciprocity can stabilize cooperation without the second-order free rider problem," Nature, Nature, vol. 432(7016), pages 499-502, November.
    2. R. Mark Isaac & James M. Walker, 1988. "Group Size Effects in Public Goods Provision: The Voluntary Contributions Mechanism," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 103(1), pages 179-199.
    3. Chamberlin, John, 1974. "Provision of Collective Goods As a Function of Group Size," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 68(2), pages 707-716, June.
    4. Haan, Marco & Kooreman, Peter, 2002. "Free riding and the provision of candy bars," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 83(2), pages 277-291, February.
    5. Esteban, Joan & Ray, Debraj, 2001. "Collective Action and the Group Size Paradox," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 95(3), pages 663-672, September.
    6. Simon Gachter & Ernst Fehr, 2000. "Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiments," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(4), pages 980-994, September.
    7. Sethi, Rajiv & Somanathan, E, 2006. "A Simple Model of Collective Action," Economic Development and Cultural Change, University of Chicago Press, vol. 54(3), pages 725-747, April.
    8. Isaac, R. Mark & Walker, James M. & Williams, Arlington W., 1994. "Group size and the voluntary provision of public goods : Experimental evidence utilizing large groups," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(1), pages 1-36, May.
    9. Carpenter, Jeffrey P., 2007. "Punishing free-riders: How group size affects mutual monitoring and the provision of public goods," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 60(1), pages 31-51, July.
    10. Gordon Tullock, 1971. "The paradox of revolution," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 11(1), pages 89-99, September.
    11. Kandori, Michihiro & Mailath, George J & Rob, Rafael, 1993. "Learning, Mutation, and Long Run Equilibria in Games," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 61(1), pages 29-56, January.
    12. Martin McGuire, 1974. "Group size, group homo-geneity, and the aggregate provision of a pure public good under cournot behavior," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 18(1), pages 107-126, June.
    13. J. H. Engel, 1954. "A Verification of Lanchester's Law," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 2(2), pages 163-171, May.
    14. Bagnoli, Mark & McKee, Michael, 1991. "Voluntary Contribution Games: Efficient Private Provision of Public Goods," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 29(2), pages 351-366, April.
    15. Esteban, Joan & Ray, Debraj, 1999. "Conflict and Distribution," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 87(2), pages 379-415, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Newton, Jonathan & Angus, Simon D., 2015. "Coalitions, tipping points and the speed of evolution," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 157(C), pages 172-187.
    2. Newton, Jonathan, 2012. "Coalitional stochastic stability," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 75(2), pages 842-854.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Gaube, Thomas, 2006. "Altruism and charitable giving in a fully replicated economy," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 90(8-9), pages 1649-1667, September.
    2. Brunner, Eric & Sonstelie, Jon, 2003. "School finance reform and voluntary fiscal federalism," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 87(9-10), pages 2157-2185, September.
    3. Thomas Gaube, 2005. "Altruism and charitable giving in a fully replicated economy," Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods 2005_8, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.
    4. Valerio Capraro & Hélène Barcelo, 2015. "Group Size Effect on Cooperation in One-Shot Social Dilemmas II: Curvilinear Effect," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(7), pages 1-11, July.
    5. Thierry Pénard & Sylvain Dejean & Raphaël Suire, 2011. "Olson’s Paradox Revisited: An Empirical Analysis of Incentives to Contribute in P2P File-sharing Communities," Economics Working Paper Archive (University of Rennes 1 & University of Caen) 201105, Center for Research in Economics and Management (CREM), University of Rennes 1, University of Caen and CNRS.
    6. Kim, Duk Gyoo, 2018. "Population uncertainty in voluntary contributions of public goods," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 145(C), pages 218-231.
    7. Grigoriadis, Theocharis, 2017. "Religion, administration & public goods: Experimental evidence from Russia," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 42-60.
    8. Bodo Sturm & Joachim Weimann, 2006. "Experiments in Environmental Economics and Some Close Relatives," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 20(3), pages 419-457, July.
    9. Jan Schmitz, 2019. "When Two Become One: How Group Mergers Affect Solidarity," Games, MDPI, vol. 10(3), pages 1-42, July.
    10. Simon Gaechter & Benedikt Herrmann, 2008. "Reciprocity, culture, and human cooperation: Previous insights and a new cross-cultural experiment," Discussion Papers 2008-14, The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham.
    11. Lim Wooyoung & Zhang Jipeng, 2020. "Endogenous Authority and Enforcement in Public Goods Games," The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 20(2), pages 1-22, June.
    12. Grolleau, Gilles & Sutan, Angela & Vranceanu, Radu, 2016. "Do people contribute more to intra-temporal or inter-temporal public goods?," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(1), pages 186-195.
    13. Juan Gabriel Rodríguez, 2015. "A Class of Social Welfare Functions That Depend on Mean Income and Income Polarization," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 61(3), pages 422-439, September.
    14. Bin Xu & C. Bram Cadsby & Liangcong Fan & Fei Song, 2013. "Group Size, Coordination, and the Effectiveness of Punishment in the Voluntary Contributions Mechanism: An Experimental Investigation," Games, MDPI, vol. 4(1), pages 1-17, February.
    15. Kamei, Kenju, 2020. "Group size effect and over-punishment in the case of third party enforcement of social norms," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 175(C), pages 395-412.
    16. Yin, Xile & Li, Jianbiao & Bao, Te, 2019. "Does overconfidence promote cooperation? Theory and experimental evidence," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 79(C), pages 119-133.
    17. Xiaoting Zheng & Puyan Nie, 2013. "Effective Punishment Needs Legitimacy," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 89(287), pages 522-544, December.
    18. Josef Falkinger, 2004. "Noncooperative Support of Public Norm Enforcement in Large Societies," CESifo Working Paper Series 1368, CESifo.
    19. Todd Sandler, 2015. "Collective action: fifty years later," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 164(3), pages 195-216, September.
    20. Li-Chen Hsu, 2013. "Tax Auditing as a Public Good Game: An Experimental Study on Punishment and Compliance," Pacific Economic Review, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 18(4), pages 475-501, October.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Collective action; group size; collective punishment; Lanchester?s equation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods
    • D74 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Conflict; Conflict Resolution; Alliances; Revolutions

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sgo:wpaper:1113. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jung Hur (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/risogkr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.