Social and Financial Incentives for Overcoming a Collective Action Problem
M. Mehrab Bakhtiar,
Raymond Guiteras and
James Levinsohn
No 340054, CEnREP Working Papers from North Carolina State University, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics
Abstract:
Addressing public health externalities often requires community-level collective action. Due to social norms, each person’s sanitation investment decisions may depend on the decisions of neighbors. We report on a cluster randomized controlled trial conducted with 19,000 households in rural Bangladesh where we grouped neighboring households and introduced (either financial or social recognition) rewards with a joint liability component for the group, or asked each group member to make a private or public pledge to maintain a hygienic latrine. The group financial reward has the strongest impact in the short term (3 months), inducing a 7.5-12.5 percentage point increase in hygienic latrine ownership, but this effect dissipates in the medium term (15 months). In contrast, the public commitment induced a 4.2-6.3 percentage point increase in hygienic latrine ownership in the short term, but this effect persists in the medium term. Non-financial social recognition or a private pledge has no detectable effect on sanitation investments.
Keywords: Consumer/Household; Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-07
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https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/340054/files/BGD-San-Soc-all.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Social and financial incentives for overcoming a collective action problem (2023)
Working Paper: Social and Financial Incentives for Overcoming a Collective Action Problem (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:nccewp:340054
DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.340054
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