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Working Paper
The impact of group membership on cooperation and norm enforcement: evidence using random assignment to real social groups
Due to incomplete contracts, efficiency of an organization depends on willingness of individuals to take non-selfish actions, such as cooperating when there is no incentive to do so or punishing inefficient actions by others. Organizations also constitute a social boundary, or group. We investigate whether this social aspect of organizations has an important benefit? fostering unselfish cooperation and norm enforcement within the group?but also whether there is a dark side, in the form of hostility between groups. Our experiment provides the first evidence free from the confounding effect of ...