Volunteering under Population Uncertainty

• Applicant: Dr. Fabian Winter
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2018 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 395336584

Modern societies become more dispersed and commonly taken for granted networks of social interaction are constantly replaced by more short-lived social encounters. And even though close knit groups have been identified as nucleus of cooperation, the prevalence of cooperative behavior in modern societies is surprisingly high. Surprisingly, collective action often happens in fairly unstructured environments. Maybe most importantly, we often have no or only partial information about how many other individuals are willing and able to engage. While we may have some rough feeling over the number of other potential "volunteers", the exact number usually unknown. Yet, with extremely few exceptions, the literature on cooperation assumes common knowledge about who is a player and how many players are involved in a social situation. Crucially, social norms are a strong driving force of cooperative behavior (Elster, 1989; Coleman, 1994; Ostrom, 2014) and might play a key role under population uncertainty. Injunctive norms (what should be done) and descriptive norms (what is commonly done) explains helping behavior even in situations where the own pivotality is actually reduced. Even if volunteering behavior is influenced by social norms, many decision makers might use self-serving excuses to downplay the importance of a norm and thus justify not to follow it. In other words, decision makers might have a situation in mind where one or more specific others - maybe a designated volunteers - do the job. As we will argue in the project, population uncertainty might hinder this mechanism because the designated volunteers or specific others might just not be present. Or, alternatively, it is harder to keep up the narrative that someone else will do the job if the group and designated volunteers are not tangible. Our goal is to gain an in-depth understanding of population uncertainty in a clearly defined context. Thus, our project will consist of 3 subprojects.\\Subproject 1 (Volunteering under population uncertainty) will study how population uncertainty influences choices in situations where only one volunteer is needed to provide a beneficial good for everybody. It establishes the paradigm and provides a first test of our social norms hypotheses.Subproject 2 (Volunteering under population uncertainty with heterogeneous actors) will help to investigate the consequence of the presence of designated volunteers, i.e., decision makers with a lower cost of volunteering.Subproject 3 (Volunteering with large groups and in the field) will test whether population uncertainty plays a role in large groups in the lab and in an internet field experiment.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants