Cooperation, A field-experimental approach

In this Chapter, we discuss scholarship on cooperation and collective action using behavioral experiments in field settings. First, we briefly summarize basic analytical concepts from the formal literature on collective action, and then introduce behavioral games as a powerful empirical tool that social scientists have adopted to measure individuals’ motives and dispositions and to test theoretically motivated mechanisms. Moving beyond the aseptic walls of the laboratory, we review different ways in which scholars studying cooperation in field settings have embedded behavioral games in their data collection strategies. Namely, lab-in-the-field behavioral experiments have been used to improve the measurement of prosocial motives, to disentangle the causal mechanisms that foster cooperation, to distinguish between compositional and contextual-interactional effects, and to isolate the causal effect of individual factors.