Social and financial incentives for overcoming a collective action problem

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Bakhtiar, M. Mehrab; Guiteras, Raymond P.; Levinsohn, James; Mobarak, Ahmed Mushfiq
• 署名单位: CGIAR; International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI); North Carolina State University; Yale University; Deakin University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-3878
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2023.103072
• 发表日期: 2023
• 关键词: development; environment; sanitation; Collective action problems

摘要

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.