Topic: Group Identity and Peer Punishment
Time: 9:00am-10:30am, Thursday, 9 June 2022
Venue: Conference Room 119, Wenqin Building
Moderator: Prof. Lu Yuanping
Guest speaker: Dr. Yang Shuo
Dr. Yang is an Assistant Professor in the School of Economics and Management at Wuhan University. His main research areas are behavioural economics, experimental economics and labour economics.
Abstract:
Cooperation is essential but difficult to sustain in social dilemmas. We conduct a lab experiment to investigate how group identity and peer punishment can influence cooperaton in a heterogeneous community with different social groups. We find that compared to a homogeneous community without groups, punishers in a heterogeneous community punish discriminatorily. Punishes respond to ingroup and outgroup punishment more favorably by increasing contributions differentially more than in the homogeneous community. Consequently, peer punishment raises cooperation and economic efficiency even more in the heterogeneous community than in the homogeneous one. These effects hinge upon group categorization and full information on participants group identities. Our findings provide valuable insights on policymaking to increase public goods provision and suggest that peer punishment is more powerful in heterogeneous communities than previously documented in homogeneous communities.