Collective action and other-regarding behavior: an assessment of games vs reality in Thailand
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Collective action and other‑regarding behavior: an assessment of games vs reality in Thailand Rawadee Jarungrattanapong1 · Suparee Boonmanunt2 Received: 5 December 2018 / Accepted: 18 January 2020 © Society for Environmental Economics and Policy Studies and Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract In social dilemmas where personal benefits are in conflict with collective benefits, there is an incentive for people to behave non-cooperatively as free-riders. However, everyday observation reveals seemingly unselfish behavior or so-called “otherregarding behavior,” which can be a motivation driving conservation decisions. This study presents evidence on how villagers behave in other-regarding games (the dictator game, trust game, and public good game), and how they behave in their actual collective actions in community conservation activities. Findings of the public good game had significant external validity with actual cooperative activities, suggesting that voluntary cooperation behavior plays a key role in real-life cooperative decision-making. However, none of the results of the answers to attitudinal trust questions provides any predictive value in estimating participation rates in conservation activities. Keywords Cooperation · External validity problem · Collective action · Lab-in-thefield experiment JEL Classification C90 · D64 · H41 · Q20
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1001 8-020-00266-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Rawadee Jarungrattanapong [email protected] Suparee Boonmanunt [email protected] 1
School of Economics, Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University, Pakkret 11120, Nonthaburi, Thailand
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Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Faculty of Medicine Ramathibodi Hospital, Mahidol University, 270 Rama VI Rd., Rachathevi 10400, Bangkok, Thailand
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Environmental Economics and Policy Studies
1 Introduction It is increasingly recognized that local communities have an important role to play in environmental conservation (e.g., Ostrom 1990). The question of how to encourage local villagers to work collectively on natural resource conservation is, therefore, an important issue to consider. Even though members of local communities rely on these resources for their livelihood, conservation of these resources is generally rare due to the characteristics of the public goods. This means that everyone can enjoy the benefits of conservation, regardless of his or her contribution. Olson (1965) referred to this situation as the free-rider problem, which arises when socially optimal outcomes could be achieved if everyone cooperated but no one is motivated to cooperate. Such a situation is a dilemma because it involves a conflict between individual rationality and optimal outcomes for a group. Therefore, villagers have little incentive to conserve or enhance the provision of such services. In other words, voluntary contributions to public
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