Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/108794 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 5246
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
To examine the effect of group size on the stability of prosocial behavior we used standard one-shot public good experiments with two and four subjects, which were conducted repeatedly three times at intervals of one week. Partner and stranger treatments were employed to control for group composition effects. All the experiments were carried out without providing feedback and using a payment mechanism promoting stable behavior, which allows the referral of all observed differences in the dynamics of behavior to different group sizes. Our findings indicate that pairs are much better at establishing and stabilizing cooperation than groups of four. Unlike pairs, groups show very low contributions to the public good in the stranger treatment and a strong tendency to decrease cooperation in the partner treatment. The results in all treatments demonstrate that moral self-licensing is a stable pattern of behavior in dynamic social dilemma contexts.
Subjects: 
repeated public good experiments
partner versus stranger
group size effects
moral self-licensing
JEL: 
C91
C73
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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