The Circulation of Worthless Tokens Aids Cooperation: An Experiment Inspired by the Kula

Many anthropological records exist of seemingly worthless tokens exchanged in traditional societies. The most famous instances of such tokens are probably the Kula necklaces and armbands first described by B. Malinowski. In our experiment, each participant can send a token to another participant before each round of a repeated public good game. We use as examples of tokens a bracelet built by the participants in the lab, a simple piece of cardboard provided by the experimenter, and an object brought from home by the participants. Notwithstanding the cheap-talk nature of the decision to send the token, both sending and receiving the token are associated with a significant increase in contributions to the public good. Regression analysis shows that contributions to the public good in the treatments featuring a bracelet and a cardboard piece are higher than in a control study. The home object appears not to have been equally useful in increasing contributions.

[1]  David G. Rand,et al.  Social heuristics shape intuitive cooperation , 2014, Nature Communications.

[2]  A. Appadurai.  The social life of things: Introduction: commodities and the politics of value , 1986 .

[3]  J. L. Pierce,et al.  The State of Psychological Ownership: Integrating and Extending a Century of Research , 2003 .

[4]  T. Klumpp.  Finitely Repeated Voluntary Provision of a Public Good , 2004 .

[5]  J. Morgan,et al.  Cheap Talk , 2005 .

[6]  Maroš Servátka,et al.  The anticipatory effect of nonverbal communication , 2016 .

[7]  L. Mittone,et al.  Norms and trades: An experimental investigation , 2015 .

[8]  Tony Lawson,et al.  Social positioning and the nature of money , 2016 .

[9]  L. Corriveau.  Game theory and the kula , 2012 .

[10]  A. Appadurai,et al.  The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. , 1988 .

[11]  N. Munn.  The fame of Gawa : a symbolic study of value transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) society , 1989 .

[12]  James Andreoni,et al.  Why free ride?: Strategies and learning in public goods experiments , 1988 .

[13]  D. K. Feil,et al.  The evolution of highland Papua New Guinea societies , 1989 .

[14]  W. H. Browne.  Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England , 1893 .

[15]  Robert Kurzban,et al.  The Social Psychophysics of Cooperation: Nonverbal Communication in a Public Goods Game , 2001 .

[16]  Thomas R. Palfrey,et al.  Testing for effects of cheap talk in a public goods game with private information , 1991 .

[17]  Brett M. Frischmann.  Two enduring lessons from Elinor Ostrom , 2013, Journal of Institutional Economics.

[18]  H. Varian,et al.  On the private provision of public goods , 1986 .

[19]  J. Ledyard.  Public Goods: A Survey of Experimental Research , 1994 .

[20]  David G. Rand.  Cooperation, Fast and Slow , 2016, Psychological science.

[21]  John O. Ledyard,et al.  Individual evolutionary learning, other-regarding preferences, and the voluntary contributions mechanism , 2012 .

[22]  H. Gintis,et al.  Costly signaling and cooperation. , 2001, Journal of theoretical biology.

[23]  J. Landa,et al.  Trust, Ethnicity, and Identity: Beyond the New Institutional Economics of Ethnic Trading Networks, Contract Law, and Gift-Exchange , 1995 .

[24]  John Duffy,et al.  Do Actions Speak Louder than Words? An Experimental Comparison of Observation and Cheap Talk , 2000, Games Econ. Behav..

[25]  Annette B. Weiner.  'A World Of Made Is Not A World Of Born': Doing Kula In Kiriwina , 1983 .

[26]  G. Camera,et al.  Money and trust among strangers , 2013, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[27]  David G. Rand,et al.  Spontaneous giving and calculated greed , 2012, Nature.

[28]  Vincent P. Crawford,et al.  A Survey of Experiments on Communication via Cheap Talk , 1998 .

[29]  F. Guala,et al.  Group membership, team preferences, and expectations , 2013 .

[30]  Jane Sell,et al.  “Liar, Liar... ” , 1997 .

[31]  P. Reny,et al.  Advanced Microeconomic Theory , 2012 .

[32]  Valerio Capraro,et al.  Social setting, intuition and experience in laboratory experiments interact to shape cooperative decision-making , 2015, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[33]  B. Malinowski.  Argonauts of the Western Pacific , 1922 .

[34]  David G. Rand,et al.  Time Pressure Increases Cooperation in Competitively Framed Social Dilemmas , 2014, PloS one.

[35]  Frederick H. Damon.  The Kula and Generalised Exchange: Considering Some Unconsidered Aspects of the Elementary Structures of Kinship , 1980 .

[36]  Fiery Cushman,et al.  Deliberation erodes cooperative behavior – even towards competitive out-groups, even when using a control condition, and even when eliminating selection bias , 2017 .

[37]  A. Cameron,et al.  Microeconometrics: Methods and Applications , 2005 .

[38]  J. Maule,et al.  Is intuition really cooperative? Improved tests support the social heuristics hypothesis , 2018, PloS one.

[39]  V. Capraro,et al.  Rethinking spontaneous giving: Extreme time pressure and ego-depletion favor self-regarding reactions , 2016, Scientific Reports.