Research Seminar Environmental & Development Economics"Politicians and their promises in an uncertain world: Evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment in India“Prasenjit Banerjee (The University of Manchester)
12. Dezember 2018
The Research Seminar Environmental & Development Economics welcomesPrasenjit Banerjee (The University of Manchester), who will present his work on
“Politicians and their promises in an uncertain world: Evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment in India”.
Place: Zentralbibliothek Recht, Rothenbaumchaussee 33 (Google Maps), Room Ro 33 BG 3/4
Hour: 12:15-13:45
We are looking forward to seeing you there!
Abstract
To combat with climate risks, India plans to create additional carbon sink by protecting existing and creating new forests and by investing in climate resilience infrastructure in the rural areas through MGNREGS programme. Successful implementation of these programs is dependent on the effort and public spirit of local politicians—as these programs are implemented by local governments comprising of elected local politicians. But such policy outcomes may be diluted by bureaucratic inefficiency, captured by elected or non-elected office holders or by other hurdles. For local citizens, uncertainty about the true cause of such failure often prevails. We examine the performance of and interaction between two mechanisms to mitigate implementation failures and to discipline politicians in a laboratory experiment with local politicians that mimic the decision-making problem faced by them. The first mechanism appeals to honorable conduct and the second one appeals to promise-keeping. In our modified dictator game, nature intervenes with positive probability and randomly allocates the endowment to the dictator (D) or the recipient (R). Our design ensures that a R who receives zero does not know whether nature intervened or not: a D’s selfish allocation can therefore be hidden. In a 2x2 design, we compare four treatments: (1) Ds choose how much to give when they, and not nature, decide the outcome in anonymous setting; (2) add the following to (1): Ds make a non-binding promise to the Rs before deciding allocation; (3) add the following to (1): Ds can reveal their actions (given the same opportunity of hiding their action) to an audience; (4): identical to (3) with the following add-on: each D’s promise is seen by respective R. While both of our mechanisms have significant positive impact on politicians' prosocial behavior (and thus on citizens' welfare), most striking results are observed in (4)—politicians’ average giving increases to almost 50:50 split and frequency of zero-giving drops significantly. Also, 90% of politicians promise to distribute a positive amount and 81% keep their promise. The observation that politicians make generous promises suggests that they care about their reputation. That politicians keep the same promises is consistent with the finding that they have intrinsic preferences for promise-keeping.