Cooperation and Status in Organizations Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • AbstractWe report the results of experiments designed to test the effect of social status on contributions to a public good, with and without punishment. The experiments are conducted in fourperson groups in a star network, where one central player observes and is observed by the others. This imposes a social structure on the game, and gives the central player a leadership role in the group, simply by virtue of being commonly observed. We further manipulate status by allocating the central position to the person who earns the highest, or the lowest, score on a trivia quiz. These highstatus and lowstatus treatments are compared, and we find that the effect of organizational structurethe existence of a central positiondepends on the status of the central player. Higher status players are attended to and mimicked more systematically. Punishment has differential effects in the two treatments, and is least effective in the highstatus case.

published proceedings

  • JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMIC THEORY

altmetric score

  • 15.384

author list (cited authors)

  • Eckel, C. C., Fatas, E., & Wilson, R.

citation count

  • 71

publication date

  • August 2010

publisher