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The Peculiar Power of Pairs

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  • Markus Sass
  • Joachim Weimann

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Markus Sass & Joachim Weimann, 2015. "The Peculiar Power of Pairs," CESifo Working Paper Series 5246, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_5246
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Mekvabishvili, Rati & Mekvabishvili, Elguja & Natsvaladze, Marine & Sirbiladze, Rusudan & Mzhavanadze, Giorgi & Deisadze, Salome, 2023. "Prosocial Behavior and the Individual Normative Standard of Fairness within a Dynamic Context: Experimental Evidence," MPRA Paper 116774, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 20 Mar 2023.
    2. Timme, Florian & Sass, Markus, 2016. "Doing it once is good, doing it twice is even better. On the dynamics of altruistic behavior," VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change 145536, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    repeated public good experiments; partner versus stranger; group size effects; moral self-licensing;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
    • C73 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Stochastic and Dynamic Games; Evolutionary Games

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