Elite Status, Market Linkages, and Contributions to Collective Goods: Evidence from a Survey and Public Goods Experiments
通过公共品实验和调查数据，研究印度农村男性农民的社会经济特征和政治关系如何影响其对集体物品的贡献，发现偏远程度低和富裕有影响力的农民合作性更低。
Cooperation is particularly important in the management of common resources where the user rights of individuals are collective. We used a one-shot public goods experiment to construct a measure of social capital, based on ‘multilateral’ cooperative behaviour, where each participant had free-riding incentives. This study was conducted in four rural villages of Odisha in India in the course of a project studying irrigation. Participants were male farmers from different social groups. Combining survey data with the artefactual field experiments, we examined how an individual’s willingness to contribute to the collective good was affected by social and economic characteristics, and political connections to the local administrative unit. The results suggest interesting differences in cooperation: in the less remote villages, farmers were less cooperative on average compared to farmers living in more remote villages. Furthermore, we found that wealthy and influential farmers invested less in the provision of a public good, reducing the likelihood of successful collective action. The findings are relevant both to the ‘collective action in the commons’ discourse and the literature on using experimental methods to deal with an individual’s true preferences for a public good.