iktisadiyat

METU Dept. of Business Administration

MARC Seminar Series

Dec. 15, 2009
Time: 13:00
Place: IIBF B, G 262

Ü. BARIŞ URHAN
(TEPAV)

Abstract

Volunteer’s dilemma is an n-people binary choice game. One volunteer is
enough to create a positive outcome which can be benefitted by all other
players. Voluntary action is costly. If no-one volunteers, everybody gets
zero payoff. Therefore, in order to receive a given benefit, at least one
volunteer is needed. Social psychologists have been discussed this
phenomenon for about 40 years under the term of “bystander effect”. Game
theorists, after almost 20 years from the first paper on social psychology
which discussed the bystander effect, came up with a game called
“volunteer’s dilemma.” While the literature agrees on that both bystander
effect and volunteer’s dilemma are reflecting the same social dilemmas, it
is argued that there is an important difference between them and therefore
we should be careful to employ the same solution concepts to both.
Furthermore, common methodologies of experimental economics may not be
suitable to study volunteer’s dilemma and therefore, we should re-consider
the common experimental procedures while doing experiments on volunteer’s
dilemma games. To test this argument, a pilot experiment involving 420
subjects is carried out. Econometric results support the argument and
provide a ground to discuss how to test volunteer’s dilemma with
computerized laboratory methods.