סמינר בהתנהגות ארגונית

Dr. Ori Weisel,Tel Aviv University

Cooperation - behavior that is costly to the individual, but increases overall welfare—can have its roots in different factors. It could be the result of (1) an intrinsic motivation to cooperate, due, for example, to prevalent norms; (2) informal punishment (e.g., peer-pressure), which also relies on the prevalence of (punishment) norms; or (3) formal sanctioning institutions (i.e., police and courts), which aim to change behavior in the absence of norms. We report on laboratory experiments conducted in the UK and in Turkey (N=632), designed to disentangle and quantify the relative impact of these three factors, and relate them to the particular normative setting (UK vs. Turkey).

Overall, we demonstrate that formal sanctioning institutions encourage best-reply reasoning and induce cooperation only when the monetary incentives are high enough. They cannot effectively foster cooperation in the long run, unless they have the support of informal peer punishment, which, in turn, requires sufficient cooperation norms.