frontiersin | We report the results of a new public
goods experiment with an intra-group cooperation dilemma and inter-group
competition. In our design subjects receive information about their
relative individual and group performance after each round with
non-incentivized and then incentivized group competition. We found that,
on average, individuals with low relative performance reduce their
contributions to the public good, but groups with low performance
increase theirs. With incentivized competition, where the relative
ranking of the group increases individual payoffs, the reaction to
relative performance is larger with individuals contributing more to the
group; further, we observe that the variance of strategies decreases as
individual and group rankings increase. These results offer new
insights on how social comparison shapes similar reactions in games with
different incentives for group performance and how competition and
cooperation can influence each other.
1. Introduction
Collective action most likely evolved as a survival
group strategy to overcome challenges and threats difficult to surpass
individually. Achieving collective action, however, requires solving the
problem of incentives within the group, namely, the conflict among
individuals who would be better materially if they reap the benefits of
cooperation by others but do not assume the cost. Groups with higher
levels of cooperation, on the other hand, could reproduce their
strategies more successfully making them more competitive against other
groups. This competition among groups over scarce resources decreases
the within-group conflict at the cost of raising the between-group
conflict1.
One particular condition shaping competition is the
availability of information on individual and group performance. When
these informational sets are independently provided, the feedback at the
group level decreases the salience of selfish incentives, increasing
within-group cooperation (Burton-Chellew and West, 2012)
at the cost of additional between-group conflict. However, subjects'
reaction to the simultaneous provision of individual and group ranking
has been rather unexplored. By receiving simultaneous feedback on
individual and group performance subjects may develop richer responses
to their relative success with respect to other group members but also
to their group's success with respect to other groups, especially in
presence of competition for additional resources. These different
incentives bring a complex interaction of cooperation and conflict. One
individual's higher relative performance could increase her individual
payoffs at the expense of reducing the relative performance of her
group, and thus harming the group's relative performance which in turn
would decrease her individual payoffs.
