Social norms, sanctions, and conditional entry in markets with externalities: Evidence from an artefactual field experiment
Journal of Public Economics · 2022 · Tobias Riehm、Nicolas Fugger、Philippe Gillen、Vitali Gretschko、Peter Werner
中文摘要
在一项以大规模异质性人群为样本的人为田野实验中，我们检验了社会规范对与真实世界负外部性相关联的市场互动的影响。我们设计了若干大规模的情景化市场，在其中卖家和买家决定是否进入市场以及为实验券出价多少。交易为卖家和买家带来利润，但同时会破坏用于公益事业的捐赠。综合所有处理组的计算，我们观察到三分之二的参与者拒绝交易。在其中一个处理组中引入对条件性道德行为的受控测量后，我们发现约四分之一的潜在交易者将自身决策建立在他人的决策之上，这表明遵从社会规范的意愿会影响负外部性市场中的交易决策。如果观察者能够制裁交易者，我们发现其中超过80%的观察者愿意承担个人成本来制裁交易，从而强制执行一种关于道德行为的社会规范。
Abstract
In an artefactual field experiment with a large and heterogeneous population sample, we test the implications of social norms for market interactions associated with negative real-world externalities. We run large stylized markets in which sellers and buyers decide whether to enter the market and how much to bid for experimental coupons. Trading leads to profits for sellers and buyers but at the same time destroys donations for a good cause. Calculated over all our treatments, we observe that two-thirds of the participants refuse to trade. Eliciting a controlled measure for conditional moral behavior in one treatment, we find that roughly a quarter of potential traders make their decisions contingent on the decisions of others, indicating that the desire to conform to social norms affects trading decisions in markets with negative externalities. If observers can sanction traders, we find that more than 80% of them are willing to incur personal costs to sanction trading, thus enforcing a social norm for moral behavior.