CeDEx workshop - Özgür Gürerk (University of Erfurt)

Voting with Feet – Community Choice in Social Dilemmas

Although economic and social interactions often take place in open communities, the dynamics of the community choice process and its impact on cooperation are yet not well understood. In Gürerk, Irlenbusch, and Rockenbach (2006) we show that a reward-and-punishment-community provides a public good more efficiently than a sanction-free community in a voting with feet setting. To fully understand the determinants of this success we conduct a series of five new experiments. We show that in community choice settings with pure punishment possibilities cooperation is significantly higher than in settings with pure reward possibilities. We further show that the initial endogenous self-selection of the subjects is an important key for the establishment and efficient maintenance of cooperation, while slow community growth is less decisive.