When the two ends meet: an experiment on cooperation and social capital
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When the two ends meet: an experiment on cooperation and social capital Pietro Battiston1,2 · Simona Gamba3 Received: 2 January 2019 / Accepted: 28 April 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract We study the behaviour of individuals with different geographic origins interacting in a same public good game. We exploit the peculiar composition of the experimental sample to compare the performance of groups where individuals have mixed origins to homogeneous groups. We find that, despite the absence of any geographic framing, mixed groups exhibit significantly lower contributions. We also find that cooperation levels differ significantly across geographic origins, in line with the existing literature. This is explained by a different impact of coordination opportunities, such as communication, as we show by manipulating them. Our results point towards integration as a crucial aspect for the economic development of intercultural societies. They also confirm that, rather than being explained just by the differences in institutions and economic opportunities, the Italian North–South divide embeds elements of distrust, prejudice and a consequent path dependence in the level of social capital Keywords Public good · Cooperation · Social capital · Cultural differences · Lab experiment JEL Classification A13 · C71 · C92 · H41 We thank for comments Marco Casari, Alessandro Bucciol, Maria Bigoni, Valentina Rotondi, participants in the 2017 Royal Economic Society Conference, the CRIEP Workshop, the 14th University of Bologna Workshop on Social Economy for Young Economists, the 13th Maastricht Behavioral and Experimental Economics Symposium, the 58th Yearly Scientific Meeting SIE, together with participants in seminars at FBK-IRVAPP, University of Bolzano and University of Milan-Bicocca. We are grateful to Chiara Busnelli for her great support. * Pietro Battiston [email protected] Simona Gamba [email protected] 1
Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Aziendali, Università degli Studi di Parma, Parma, Italy
2
Institute of Economics, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy
3
Department of Economics and Finance, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Economia Politica
1 Introduction Almost since the dawn of experimental economics, researchers have looked with growing interest at what experiments ran in different locations and contexts could reveal about the specific characteristics of cultures and societies. This is particularly true for experiments focusing on traits related to social capital, such as trust (Croson and Buchan 1999; Cassar and Wydick 2010), cooperation (Cason et al. 2002; Finocchiaro Castro 2008) and fairness (Oosterbeek et al. 2004), given the fundamental role that social capital bears in explaining variations in institutional organisation and economic outcomes (Knack and Keefer 1997; Buonanno et al. 2009; Hoyman et al. 2016; Camussi et al. 2018). Some countries have been shown to exhibit important internal differences in social capital across
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