Abstract:
Cooperation is indispensable in human societies, and much progress has been made
towards understanding human pro-social decisions. Formal incentives, such as
punishment, are suggested as potential effective approaches despite the fact that
punishment can crowd out intrinsic motives for cooperation and detrimentally impact
efficiency. This dissertation examines the role of non-monetary reward in promoting prosocial
behaviors.
Following the theory of Holländer (1990), the first chapter provides evidence from a
laboratory experiment indicating that people under competition value approval highly,
but only when winners earn visible rewards through approval. The evidence implies that
approval’s value is tied to signaling motives. While the first chapter attempts to explain
aggregate pro-social behavior using economic theory that can be generalized across
contexts, the second and the third chapters resort to theories of evolutionary psychology,
with an emphasis on gender effects.
The second chapter examines gender differences in prosociality using theories from
evolutionary psychology and empirical evidence from experimental economics. This
chapter is to bridge this gap between the source of gender differences in pro-sociality and
experimental research by arguing that differences in male and female motives for
prosociality stem, at least in part, from gender differences in mating strategies. In
particular, in: (i) signaling behaviors; (ii) conformance to social norms; and (iii)
approaches toward resolving intra- and inter-group dilemmas. Drawing on costlysignaling
theory that is heavily discussed in the second chapter and in light of the widely
established competitive nature of males, the third chapter uses a controlled laboratory
experiment to show that cooperation is sustained in a generosity competition with trophy
rewards, but breaks down in the same environment with equally valuable but non-unique
and non-displayable rewards. In particular, males’ competition for trophies is the driving
force behind treatment differences. In contrast, it appears that female competitiveness is
not modulated by trophy rewards.
