Matthias Lankau

Dissertation Topic
Institutional Designs of Public Goods in the Context of Cultural Property

Brief Description
The dissertation is divided in two parts. The first part examines the case of how traditional cultural expressions (TCEs) can be protected by formal institutions of collective property rights against unauthorized use by non-community members. Specifically, Chapters 2 and 3 evaluate and compare economic impacts of five so called sui generis rights for the protection of TCEs and derive policy recommendations. The analysis results in an ordinal ranking of the model laws firstly with regard to transaction costs for negotiating access to TCEs as far as an underutilization can occur. Secondly, the chapters compare the model laws according to their potential to serve local communities' preferences for protection. This is highlighted by showing that a principal-agent problem occurs if state agencies are provided with a lot of bargaining power. In this case bureaucrats will serve their own purposes more than those of the actual holders of sui generis rights. Lastly, there is a clear tradeoff between both effects of sui generis protection: The more a law respects the local communities' protection preferences the higher are its transaction and thus social costs. Employing economic experiments, the second part of this dissertation is devoted to the more general question of how public goods in the context of cultural property (such as TCEs) are provided by group members. In particular, it focusses on the influence of subjects' social identity on their degree of positive and negative reciprocity, which is captured by different measures of their conditional cooperation as well as punishment behavior, respectively. Chapter 4 employs a within-subject design based on one-shot public good games in strategy method. The article shows that social identity systematically invokes different cooperation preferences depending on the matching circumstances. In particular, when matched with in-group members, subjects consistently show the preference for higher levels of conditional cooperation and thus less self-serving bias than in out-group matching. Additionally, they show an elevated propensity to be a free-rider when matched with individuals of a different identity. These results indicate that it can be reasonable to devise policy institutions that strengthen the feeling of belonging to a particular group enhancing social welfare. Making use of a ten-periods public good game, Chapter 5 yields that comparatively higher expectations on in-group than on out-group members' cooperativeness are the main driver for welfare enhancements when subjects interact with members of a common identity over multiple periods. The degree of conditional cooperation (here, to what extent subjects reciprocate these expectations by own contributions) is, however, similar in all matching protocols. Consequently, the results of this article clearly underline the paramount importance of expectations in determining cooperation under social identity. Chapter 6 analyzes how peer-punishment affects subjects' cooperativeness in the provision of public goods under social identity. The article employs a series of one-shot public good games in strategy method both with and without the institution of peer punishment. It finds, firstly, that the strongest increase in subjects' cooperativeness is present in out-group matching, especially for individuals classified as free-riders. This is most likely due to an anticipation of comparably strong punishment by individuals of different identities. Secondly, the presence of peer-punishment clearly eliminates the existence of an in-group bias typically prevalent without punishment. Lastly, the results indicate that compared to a situation in which merely peer-punishment is present an identity affiliation - independent whether subjects interact in identity-homogenous or heterogeneous groups - may raise social welfare. Turning to negative reciprocity, Chapter 7 examines whether social identity affects individuals' willingness to sanction deviating group members in a public good context. The results indicate that members of identity homogeneous groups punish much less often and in smaller amounts than of heterogeneous groups when they face contributions smaller than their own. Also, anger-like emotions influence punishment behavior much stronger when individuals are matched with members of different identities than in identity homogenous groups. All in all, the insights of the second part of this dissertation show that subjects' identity affiliation is determining their degree of positive and negative reciprocity and thus the level of social welfare obtained in a public goods context. Consequently, social identity should be considered as relevant in the provision of specific types of cultural property, such as TCEs, as well. Even more so, the results are of crucial importance for improving economists' ability to predict behavior and derive policy recommendations for public good contexts involving social identity in general.

Reference
Matthias Lankau: Institutional Designs of Public Goods in the Context of Cultural Property. Dissertation, Sammlung der Wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Fakultät, Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, 2014.
Download: http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-1735-0000-0022-5E27-A