Browsing by Author "Cox, James C."

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Trust in Private and Common Property Experiments
(2007) Cox, James C.; Ostrom, Elinor; Walker, James M.
"We report the results from a series of experiments designed to investigate behavior in two settings that are frequently posited in the policy literature as generating different outcomes: private property and common property. The experimental settings closely parallel earlier experimental studies of the investment or trust game. The primary research question relates to the effect of the initial allocation of property rights on the level of trust that subjects will extend to others with whom they are linked. We find that initial endowments as common property lead to marginally greater cooperation or trust than when the initial endowment is fully owned by the first player as private property. Subjects' decisions are also shown to be correlated with attitudes toward trust and fairness measured in post-experiment questionnaires."
Trust with Private and Common Property: Effects of Stronger Property Right Entitlements
(2010) Cox, James C.; Hall, Daniel T.
"Is mutually beneficial cooperation in trust games more prevalent with private property or common property? Does the strength of property right entitlement affect the answer? Cox, Ostrom, Walker, et al. report little difference between cooperation in private and common property trust games. We assign stronger property right entitlements by requiring subjects to meet a performance quota in a real effort task to earn their endowments. We report experiment treatments with sequential choice and strategy responses. We find that cooperation is lower in common property trust games than in private property trust games, which is an idiosyncratic prediction of revealed altruism theory. Demonstrable differences and similarities between our strategy response and sequential choice data provide insight into the how these protocols can yield different results from hypothesis tests even when they are eliciting the same behavioral patterns across treatments."