SOCIETÀ ITALIANA DI DIRITTO ED ECONOMIA
Nourhan Hassan (Hamburg university)
Abstract
To align private and public interests in social dilemmas, formal regulations have been developed providing enforcement mechanisms to promote cooperation and decrease free riding. Although formal rules depending on sanctioning free riders and rewarding cooperators work in some cases, they are costly to implement. In addition, unless individuals' behavior is observed and external monitoring is high, these legally binding rules are not effective. In a 2x2 lab experimental design, this paper investigates whether a proverb encouraging cooperation can foster voluntarily cooperative behavior in a Voluntary Contribution Mechanism (VCM) public goods game with low monitoring and no punishment mechanisms. The results show that a proverb reflecting an injunctive norm of cooperation increase contribution levels with no significant difference between its effect and a non-proverbial injunctive statement’ effect. In addition, no moderating effect for social type is found; the results show no statistically significance difference in the effect of both the injunctive proverb and the injunctive statement on contribution between prosocials and proselfs . The results of this paper imply that proverbs could be used by policy makers as a soft low-cost intervention in social (norms) marketing campaigns such as in vaccination posters for public health campaigns.