Event Information
The next speaker in the EEU seminar series is Håkan Eggert, from the Department of Economics at the Univeristy of Gothenbrug. Håkan will present the paper "Positional Externality, Ethnicity, and Punishment in a Public Good Game” by Wisdom Akpalu, Håkan Eggert, Eric Kuada, and Mark S. Kudzordzi.
You can find the abstract of the paper below.
The seminar takes place Monday, 5th of December 12.05-13.00 (Stockholm time).
https://gu-se.zoom.us/j/63849931037?pwd=cmEra2FuajNsOGpMZnhrdEFWSkd6Zz09
Meeting ID: 638 4993 1037
Passcode: 641462
Abstract
When funds earmarked for a public project are embezzled, society bears the costs of the deficit in the provision of the public good and ‘positional externality’ if the stolen funds are expended on conspicuous consumption. However, the willingness to punish and the intensity of punishment of the perpetrator depends on the co-ethnicity and cross-ethnicity of the victim and the perpetrator. A Public Good experiment with a probabilistic third-party punishment and costly peer-to-peer punishment has been implemented to disentangle the two effects. We found that peer-to-peer costly punishment engendered cooperation, but the third-party enforcement does not affect individual contributions. Next, the likelihood of punishing a free rider is influenced by co-ethnicity and cross-ethnicity, whether (or not) a third-party punishment occurs. While the majority ethnic group members are more likely to punish a free rider from a cross-ethnic than a co-ethnic group, the ‘rival’ minority group rather punishes the co-ethnic group member more. This implies that in-group and out-group punishment may depend on the relative sizes of the groups. Further, regarding the intensity of punishment, both ethnic groups punished out-group members more when there is no third-party punishment, reflecting evidence of positional externality. On the contrary, however, in-group punishment is rather more severe when the third-party punishes the free rider in the group.