Essays on the non-monetary aspects of cooperative behaviours

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three independent essays that explore the non-monetary aspects on the cooperative behaviours. In the first essay, I analyse the effect of social interaction on the decision to contribute to public good. To examine the effect of social interaction, I construct a sampling design where respondents are divided into three different groups, namely treated, untreated, and control groups. The respondents in the treated and untreated groups were allowed to interact/discuss with each other, within and across groups, prior to the WTP elicitation question. I find that treated and untreated respondents with social interactions have higher and significant likelihood to purchase the public good relatively to control respondents. While those who did not have interaction have a lower WTP for the improvement of waste management. In the second essay, which is a join work with Luis Aranda, we investigate how cognitive abilities correlate with civic engagement of older Euro- peans (aged 50+), using waves two and three of the SHARE dataset. The results advocate for the existence of a causal relationship running from cognition in old age to community engagement. In the last essay, I compare whether the results from having an observer and an exemplar in a public good game are similar. To make this comparison, I employ a four-players finitely repeated public goods experiment on two directed star networks, observer and exemplar networks. I find evidence that the behaviours of players are statistically indistinguishable across network structures. However, the players who belong to the observer network are more willing to conform with the group behaviours, meaning that they will increase (reduce) the contributions if theirs are below (above) their groups average. Furthermore, I also find evidence that the contributing behaviours are more stable in the observer networks than in the exemplar network.